I can’t believe this worked: a colleague had a problem with her TFT monitor today. All the icons on the screen had shadows to the right of them, as did the letters of any text. It was a mess. I tried the reset function on the menu, with no effect. As far as I could see the monitor needed replacing, and the way to do that is to call the help desk and have an engineer come down to confirm it cannot be fixed. When he turned up he just whacked the side of the screen and all the pixels just fell into place. Magic.
I recommended to the engineer that when he closed the fault call he described the action as ‘percussive maintenance’ rather than ‘ gave it a good slap’.  Its a term I can remember from years back, though I can;t remember if we ever used it in anger. Whenever I have used that technique it has always been a last resort, and it has never worked. The other field engineer jargon I like, from the same period, is “BRB reset”.  I believe it was a phrase used by IBM engineers to describe the now legendary ‘switching it off and on again’
BRB standing, of course, for ‘Big Red Button’.
Rob has just mentioned the RTFM approach – have you tried that on people?
RTFM? How quaint… manuals are so 20th Century!