VWs and Toast

I used to own a 1988 VW Gti. I loved that car. It was fast, looked great, handled well and had a very comfortable ride. As it aged, however, it developed a problem that no one could diagnose. Once in a while it would start running rough, e.g. jerking and sputtering. The problem could be remedied if I pulled over, turned it off, chanted a haiku, then turned it back on. After that it would be fine for months.

I remembered this as I was helping a patron who was trying to burn a CD of photographs on one of our Macs, using the Toast TItanium program. We tried repeatedly but kept getting weird error messages, ending in "The disc could not be burned." Finally, I shut the program down, then restarted. It worked! Our tech guy always says, "The first line of defense is to restart," but I didn't want to restart the whole computer if I didn't have to. Luckily, the easy fix worked, although who can say why?