Gotta love NASA and the Lenovo T420s Hardware Manual

Cosmic radiation can refer not only to incoming radiation from outside the solar system, but also from the sun (NASA calls them “solar energetic particles”). If you’ve ever watched NASA tv, you know that solar flares can look very impressive; for this reason they have potentiated many years of ideal scapegoating when a technical problem must be blamed on something abstruse or impossible to refute.

So the next time you have a bizarre issue that really cries out for some kind of doublespeak label, feel free to pull this gem directly from page 56 of the Lenovo ThinkPad T420s Hardware Maintenance Manual.

Keep in mind these events are intermittent at best, and often very transient, sometimes clearing up in a matter of minutes. This may seem like a downside, but can be used advantageously to get your caller off the phone:

“I’ve got another call coming in which could be related to your issue. The vast majority of energized particles should be exiting near-Earth vicinity shortly; please power off your machine for ten minutes, then restart it and email us with an update.”

If you’re feeling really bold, toss in the phrase “coronal mass ejection” since the vaguely ominous acronym “CME” can then be thrown around rather indiscriminately, which should further allow you to intone something funereal like, “I’d better warn them to harden the data center while they still can.”