**3. The BitLocker effect and the imponderables of academic life**

This subtitle was not foreseen, but there is the so-called Murphy's law3 or "the imponderables of real life," [27] or even more the imponderables of academic life that

<sup>3</sup> "Qualquer coisa que possa dar errado, dará errado e no pior momento possível".

#### *Numerical Simulation – Advanced Techniques for Science and Engineering*


**Figure 2.** *Author's notebook screen.*

is when the notebook believes it is suffering some kind of cyberattack and does not allow the human to have control of the situation, just like Hal 9000 my notebook had a single objective, not to allow anyone (not even me) to access the hardware.

Just over a week to send this article, I revised it, formatting, font, after exhausting days/weeks/hours of adjustments, the goal of finishing the article was overcome by my organic limitations. There are times when, after analyzing images in search engines, reading data lists, arguing, and referencing so much, this organic body that typed these lines runs out, unlike machines. I left the glasses on the corner of the table and lowered the notebook screen (I was condescending, after all I would like at least my machine to rest) a few minutes before sending the complete work when I returned to the workflow this around 30 minutes, which was my surprise when I lifted the notebook screen and noticed that instead of the wallpaper as usual, there was this warning (**Figure 2**):

From experience, the worst thing to do in these cases where our machines hijack our academic research and all the materials accumulated for the making of the doctoral thesis, projects, etc., is to consult online search engines, and that is because all the tutorials said the same thing: "click F2 directly, give this command and with that my friends the entire drive will be erased, with factory formatting and don't forget to leave your likes."

I had already gone through something similar to notebooks before this one, but seeing a work about to be submitted held hostage, my organic algorithms adjusted to deliver the result: Tears. I came up with this role so after so much pressure and desperation it was what I had at the moment. I could not think rationally, that was it, my own machine had betrayed me. I called my partner in tears and she said: "it would be comical if it wasn't tragic, a work on machines hijacked by your own machine, leave him in the corner of thought and let's have lunch."

I was the one who kept thinking what was behind the notebook's action? Until reaching this conclusion, the crying would not stop and the hours were passing, after lunch, I called the notebook company, the call center's response was: "Bitlocker is when your machine thinks you may be suffering a cyberattack and is securing your information, you can only access it with Bitlocker recovery keys if you do not have a recovery key you will not be able to access your computer and if you cannot revert you will have to reset your device, this action removes all your files."

I turned off my cell phone. A few minutes of silence until I recover and think of another way to recover the machine and files. I called Microsoft and was answered by
