Symptoms are just symptoms

Season 5 episode 2 of Dr House focused on the argument that symptoms are just symptoms, they tell you something is wrong but they don't necessarily conclude what the real problems are. A doctor has to deduct them. It doesn't mean that giving random medicine that suggests a person's recovery means that he/she is cured unless the doctor conclusively identifies the root cause.

I spent almost two hours chatting to a friend while trying to figure out why I couldn't set the iphone mail account properly. The error message indicated it was something to do about the SSL setting. I tried to find ways to set the SSL config but I couldn't because the system was returning another error that says the SSL config cannot be locally set. Conflicting errors indicating symptoms of a problem. After reading and re-reading the instruction manual, it occured to me that yes indeed the SSL setting cannot be done uniquely for a phone. The manual doesnt say that the password needs to be changed but it specifically asks the users to update the email address from the dummy one, and then asks for a password change. I went to the password change screen and was curious why there wasn't any existing/old password required. And then I remembered that a password is required when adding the email account. So I thought, maybe the real problem is that the email address I created doesn't have a password value that it can validate against, and because in the computing world NULL is different from SPACE, I thought that maybe it doesnt have proper exception handling to return the right error message. So in short, I added a password and did the whole setting again with the new password, and viola!

Most of the times, things are not really what they seem they are...