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It's funny. Laugh. Hardware

Possessed Technology? 107

Posted by Cliff from the gremlins-in-your-gadgets dept.
gordlea asks: "Has anyone ever had a gadget that has acted in a seemingly possessed manner, or that seemed to have a personality of it's own? We once owned a Panasonic fax/phone/answering machine. This thing was crazy, it would randomly call up people who had called our place recently and play back messages other people had left for us. Occasionally it would even record our conversations and play them back to people who called when we weren't around! So do you have any good anecdotes along similar lines? I'm looking forward to hearing them!"
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Possessed Technology? More

Possessed Technology?

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  • Chuckie (Score:5, Funny)

    by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @04:19PM (#5640094) Journal
    Chuckie, the art lab's old Mac II-something-or-other, which had a defective power supply. The thing would turn on by itself randomly, and someone changed the startup sound to be "I'm ALIVE!"

  • PCs! (Score:3, Funny)

    by KevinIsOwn ( 618900 ) <herrkevin@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @04:20PM (#5640097) Homepage
    Yeah, I had this PC once and it was like beep beep beep... it was awful.
  • PC LOAD LETTER?!?!!? What the fuck does that mean?!?!?
    • I remember watching Sightings years ago where this older couple was experimenting with taking a video of a video. Basically the camera would record an infinity of audio and video. They played it back and could see images of a young girl who had passed away and some guy who appeared to be saying "I've come up with Betty". They must've played the "I've come up with Betty" clip a thousand times and now it's forever drilled into my head.

      I think of it often in my daydreams at random times when it doesn't hav
    • It means "Please Can you LOAD some more LETTERs?" The printer has printed all the letters that it has available, it doesn't even have enough to write out the full error message. Either put more letters in it or try printing numbers.
      • Just in case I HAVN'T just been trolled (unlikely), it's Paper Cartrage Load Letter

        Load Letter size paper in the Paper Cartrage.

        And I've had some recent Office Space type experiances at my job... damn fax machine always jammes when it's low on paper, in the same place, where I have to reach under the damn thing and pull with no room, the motherfucker beeping at me and pulling the paper back in while I try....... I want a peice of that damn POS...
  • heheh, ok although all thease fake stories are funny it would have been better if they had temporarily set it to show everyone as haveing bad karma (though not so it affected the weightings of posts just showed as being bad :-)
    posessed technology..... ehhhe

  • Yeah.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by sporty ( 27564 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @04:24PM (#5640128) Homepage
    Yeah.. we had a webserver, and for some reason, it kept letting some random group of editors keep posting really bad stories.

    We kinda liked the server, but found the email addresses of the editors and spammed them to death. :P

  • YEA! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Neck_of_the_Woods ( 305788 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @04:26PM (#5640134) Journal
    I once had a television set that would turn itself on or off every night at 2am, then again 9 minutes later. Accept on May the 7th for some strange reason. It died in my last move and did not give a rats ass about time zones or daylight savings time. So the time it did it's thing would flux with what ever was going on time zone wise. Just to kill your ideas of what was going on, this tv did not have a remote or any kind of digital timing device or service. It was just your run of the mill tv.

    • Re:YEA! (Score:1)

      by Mr Z ( 6791 )

      The TV was probably responding to power glitches. 2AM sounds like a good time of night to switch generators into and out of the power grid.

      --Joe
    • My parents had a TV with a built in timer. I played around with it one day, set it to turn on at 1:00 PM and off again at 1:09 or something.

      We went on vacation and asked a neighbor to watch the house for us. She came over one afternoon just in time to see the TV turn off.

      I think she wandered around the house, scared out of her wits, for half an hour. Probably figured it was a burgular or a ghost.

    • Re:YEA! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Telecommando ( 513768 )
      I bought a TV some years ago that would turn itself on or off whenever a certain car drove in front of our house. The only thing that stopped it was to leave the shades closed all the time or move the TV so it didn't face the window. The car had a brightly lit digital display we could see from the house and we always assumed that the display was modulated in a pattern that just happened to be the same code as he TV's on/off signal. Eventually the guy either moved away or sold the car. We haven't had it happ
    • My parents had a black and white TV which was on when they came home from dinner one night (don't know if I was born yet, definitely before I was sentient).

      They couldn't turn it off. They had to unplug it to turn it off. Apparently lightning struck and melted the switch just enough for it to be in the "on" position, and not just the little bit more which would have fried it. Neat bit of nature, that.

      They still have it. They're packrats. And cheap, too -- they never even had it looked at, just accep

  • They spout cryptic languages before apparitions of the server slam through my server room walls.

  • Distrubing Answering machine (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Boglin ( 517490 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @04:34PM (#5640177) Journal

    Despite today's date, this is a true story. If I was going to make something up, I wouldn't have chosen a story this lame.

    My grandmother suffered from senile dementia, so she would forget that she was talking to an answering machine. Well, every time it hung up on her, she would call back to yell at my mother (whose voice was on the answering machine message) for hanging up. The end result was that we would leave to go to dinner (yes, I was living with my parents, but I was seven, so it's not forgivable), we would come back and there would be twenty-some messages from her. Well, for about a month after she passed away, any time we would go anywhere, we would come home to find twenty odd messages on the machine. They would all be blank, but it was still kind of creepy.
  • The mouse on an old gateway of mine was developing problems. It would seemingly randomly move about the screen click and dragging like mad. I swore up and down there was a virus or a trojan on the machine. When I took the CPU/CASE to my bro's house to "borrow" his virus scan software it worked fine with his mouse.
    • I've got an HP 8200e USB burner. This damn thing decides to open and close the drawer in an endless loop at early morning times. Nothing can stop it expcept for disconnecting the power.

      It gets even worse when I try to burn more than 1 CD. Once the drawer is opened after burning the first disc, the thing goes psycho and starts opening and closing the drawer again. It doesn't even let me get my burnt CD out!

      open...close...open...close...open...close....gr rr
      • A similar story: My no-name DVD-ROM drive, a pretty recent 16x model, doesn't let go of discs. When I press the Eject button, the drive spins up, the read light turns on, and half a minute later, it spins back down. Doesn't let me have my disc unless I reboot and go into the BIOS. I need to go into My Computer and use it's eject button, or a similar software-controlled eject.

        BTW, I don't wanna get any crap about "My Computer". It's my windows box. I use it to play games. If I want to use linux, I'll push a
    • My current moust pointer is posessed... but then all my coworkers find the same problem in Windows 2000. Sometimes it moves north by itself, sometimes west. Everyone here seems to just accept it. One coworker freaked when he saw my pointer move east by itself. Apparently that was just crazy.

      • I have that sort of problem with my "eraser head" mouse on my laptop. I just let it go until the driver decides it needs to recalibrate/rezero itself. It seems rezero whenever it sees a fixed non-zero input for more than about 5 seconds.

        --Joe
        • Toshiba, right?

          I HATE how they do that!

          Usually when your busy doing something important, and you just fight it and keep going about your own business.. after about half a minute to a minute you realise there is no point fighting it, cuz it will keep insisting on doing it and won't stop. That, and it slowly gets worse and it tries to head west faster and faster... grrrr.

          D.
          • My Toshiba does that...you'd think they'd fix it or something. What I wonder is if it's a hardware issue (touchstick gets stuck just a bit off center) or software.

          • I've had it happen both with my Toshiba and my Dell. I wonder if both eraser-head mice are made by the same manufacturer... I know the Dell one is a "Synaptics" brand guy, but I'm not sure off-hand who made the Toshiba one.

            The nice thing is that the driver does re-zero the eraser head if you let it alone and let it reset. That's a double-edged sword, though. I'm sure a good fraction of the "ghost motions" resulted from rezeroing while I was trying to smoothly, slowly scroll through my document.

            --Joe

            • I've had it happen both with my Toshiba and my Dell. I wonder if both eraser-head mice are made by the same manufacturer...

              Not quite, but according to "Upgrading and repairing PCs" all pointers of this type are licensed from IBM and use their design. My IBM thinkpad does it too, and it's a shame because otherwise trackpoints are brilliant devices and cause me much less pain than a mouse would.
          • ok. I have seen that and have an explanation. the rubber seems to melt and starts to stick to the plastic of the adjacent keys. when I removed the rubber thingie and used the plastic joystick thing, it would not do it, ever...

  • Not a problem (Score:3, Funny)

    by daeley ( 126313 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @04:38PM (#5640200) Homepage
    Yeah, sounds like they're sending out packages with the evil bit switched on. Check RFC 3514 [rfc-editor.org] for more info.

  • Laundry machines (Score:2, Redundant)

    by dacarr ( 562277 )
    The laundry machines where I live are possessed. They eat money.

  • Nazi computer (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lord Bitman ( 95493 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @04:43PM (#5640229)
    I had an intro to programming class once, one of the assignments was to demonstrate random number generation- randomly generate an x,y,and color for a pixel, then draw it.
    The person sitting behind me started theirs up and it drew a perfect nazi flag, except the background was white and the circle was red, instead of the normal way [adl.org]
  • not sure if this counts...but I have a bunch of RJ45, that if you hold it at a certain (unknown) angle, it just starts dropping packets. damn i spent a lot of hours chasing down TCP/IP configurations, just to finally realize that it would work according to how I nudged the cord...

    Oh yeah, and our answering machine speaker sometimes starts "clicking" randomly (I guess it's just interference from somewhere)...and taking phantom messages from nobody...

  • answering machine (Score:3, Funny)

    by mpweasel ( 539631 ) <mprzyjazny@gm a i l . c om> on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @04:48PM (#5640278) Homepage
    Yep, answering machines seem to be the most commonly possessed household appliances. My parents' machine still gets really strange noisy messages recorded on it at random. They sound like something out of the exorcist... Laughing, moaning, crying, and voices speaking backward. Of course, I could have imagined it all. It was mostly just hissing and white noise. But if you listened closely enough....

    • My answering machine was once reprogrammed by my cat ..

      The outgoing message was changed to say "*scrabble* *scratch* *hiss* *thump* ... pause .. *MIOW*"

      I almost wish I'd left hte message as it's a damn sight more interesting than mine.

      The funny thing is that I didn't realise and nobody told me for several weeks!

  • I've got a good one. (Score:4, Funny)

    by heldlikesound ( 132717 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @04:48PM (#5640279) Homepage
    A few years ago, my father purchased a big LazyBoy recliner, that would affectionately be nicknamed the "Superchair". A few weeks went by and we were all enjoying the chair when dad wasn't around. Built in butt warmer, vibarating back massager, very nice indeed.

    So one day at about 1am I come home from hanging out with the some friends, and pass by the chair to head off to bed.

    As I walk past the chair it begins to speak directly to me in a soft, stoic, womans voice.

    "Stephen, this is Judy. How are you? I haven't spoken with you in quite sometime."

    At this point I freeze, I have never been so scared in my life, a chair, the SuperChair is talking to me, and it seems to know my name. I turn slowly towards the chair, part of me wanted to run as fast as I could out of the house, and part of me want to confront my four legged stranger.

    I didn't run, I stood frozen for a few more second and then proceeded slowly to the chair.

    No more speaking, but the silence was just a erie. I turned on a small light and began to examine the chair.

    Ahah! As it turns out the chair had an answering machine built into the flip-up armrest that my dad must have hooked up to the phone line. We've never had an answering machine, so the thought never crossed my mind. The woman was friends mother called about an offer I made to help choose a CD player system...

    One thing we didn't ever figure out, why did the chair start speaking right when I walked past it?

    So now sometimes when the wind blows just right and SuperChair is feeling a bit alive, you can hear the words swirling around my living room:

    "This is Judy.... This is Judy... This Judy...."
    • Dude, she was probably on the phone and leaving a message when you passed it, duh! :)
    • I was sitting at work one night, sneaking in some slacking time. I was telnetted into the server at home, when a great idea stuck me. I remembered that I had left the volume setting of the amplifier connected to the server's sound card reasonably high, so I did a search for 'satan.wav', something that would freak out my roommate. The computer I was on didn't have a sound card, so I wasn't able to play the sound before I ftp'd it to the server and ran 'sox satan.wav.' I waited a few minutes and typed it
      • One of my coworkers related a story like that - apparently, they regularly played audio files on the Sun workstations of their coworkers working at a remote site by logging into the workstation at the remote site & copying the file directly to the sound device.

        That practice got stopped when they sent an audio clip with a particularly dirty joke on it, only to find out that a fairly important shareholder was getting a tour of the remote site right at that moment.

  • True story (Score:3, Funny)

    by bardencj ( 122074 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @05:04PM (#5640413)
    I had an OS/2 box that froze up for ten minutes, after which the printer spit out something I wrote a few months before but had never printed.

    Is it Halloween yet?

  • Mitel phone system (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Degrees ( 220395 ) <degrees@gerisch.COWme minus herbivore> on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @05:07PM (#5640437) Homepage Journal
    The factory I worked at a long time ago put in a new Mitel phone system when they moved the building to another site. It had some sort of integration with Dictaphone equipment, where a road-warrior could call in on a cell-phone, punch a few codes, and start dictating onto tape. The next day, the transcriptionist would have the memo ready for signing. For diagnostic purposes, the system could call the vendor and do some sort of status reporting.

    Anyway, the system would randomly call not only the vendor, but the cell-phones of the road-warriors, too. Made for some horrific bills.

    So I am at work late one night, programming my little heart out, and my telephone rings. I pick it up, hear the clicks of lines being accessed, and then hear ringing.

    "Hello."
    "Hello."
    "What did you want?"
    "Did you call me?"
    "No. You called me."
    "Actually, my phone rang, and I picked it up, and am now talking to you."
    "I'm hanging up now."
    "Good night."
    "(click)"

    The whole dictation thing lasted about a month.

    And then I have the story about it prank calling me every 60 seconds while I was on receptionist duty....

  • i was working as a sysadmin in a small office environment, and we found a new use for an old HP printer that had been sitting in the basement for a little over a year.

    a few days after i had put it back in service, it spat out (without warning or provocation) a document dated from its previous life. spooky.
    • printers are crazy things. I had one that skrewed up and ending up printing up documents that were almost a year old.. including porn lol. I never thought printers would have that large of a buffer to print out 8 month old documents from memory.
    • Once I was responsible for possessing an HP printer.

      It was freshman year of college, and we had a nice HP 4 series laserjet for the dorm to use. I was the first one to figure out you could change the "READY" message on the LCD screen by sending the appropriate PJL commands.

      Well, that was pretty fun. Error messages started confusing other students: error messages such as "PAPER UPSIDEDOWN" and "45 MOLDY TONER". Everyone figured it out after a couple weeks, and they had fun with messages like "HACK THE PLAN
  • I went to a hotel once, that spoke to me, gushed blood and tried to make me kill my annoying-voiced scrawny wife... oh wait that was a movie.

  • I have a Windows server (Score:4, Funny)

    by HotNeedleOfInquiry ( 598897 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @05:32PM (#5640584)
    That hasn't been rebooted in 3 months. Does that count?

  • As a matter of fact (Score:3, Funny)

    by ninewands ( 105734 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @05:39PM (#5640631)
    My Linux box is possessed by several daemons, as is my VR-3 Linux-based PDA ...

    oh ... okay, I'll go sit in time-out now.
    • Got a question for you about your VR-3, because mine is apparently kinda posessed:

      Have you had any trouble with horizontal lines of dead pixels on the screen? I've got a bunch of them along the bottom of my screen, and I can't seem to get rid of them...

  • This one time the phone rang. So I picked it up and the neighbor from across the street was talking. To somebody else!! Apparently the phone company just rang me up and tapped me into their conversation. And not, this was not a party line.

    Also this one time (no joke) I took a Zelda 1 cartridge out of the NES and put in the Mario 3. The Zelda title screen appeared. Although there was no sound and it was broken, and no input was accepted and it kept blinking with an alternating solid color screen. Some
    • Your Zelda experience is easily explained -- the video chip inside the NES probably still held the graphics for the Zelda screen. The NES was coming up crashed due to a bad connection on the cart port. The video chip was displaying 'garbage' left over in video RAM.
    • That high pitched noise from the television set is probably from the horizontal sweep section, which runs at about 15,750 Hz, which is near the upper limit of human hearing. Something made of metal, and probably no longer properly secured to the chassis, is expanding and contracting at that rate due to what's called magneto-striction and the expansion and contraction pushes and pulls at the surronding air, creating a sound wave.
    • I've some odd experiences with the old NES myself. Best was one time playing super mario 1. Something must have gotten screwwed with I put it in, but the 1st level was all messed up, platforms and ladders where they shouldn't have been. The thing froze at the end of the first level when I hit the flag and reseting it brought it back to normal.
  • It only sends out evil bits!
  • My cordless answer phone has been slowly losing brain cells over the last 5 years. Msg playback from the base doesn't work now, msg light always on, etc, etc.
    Some time ago I had a power outage at home and afterwards the thing really went berserk, it resurrected month old deleted messages and appended random fragments of old messages to my announcement.

  • Help I have a posessed keyboard! (Score:3, Funny)

    by skinfitz ( 564041 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @06:56PM (#5641071) Journal
    No you dont. Move along. Nothing to see here.
  • Well, I can't think of anything creepy at the moment, but my Kyocera 6035 Smartphone will occasionally start vibrating for no reason. Sometimes it will vibrate once, like it does if I get a message in silent mode, and keep doing that every few minutes until I reset it. But there is no message! Messages from the dead, maybe?? And once it just started vibrating constantly and nothing I did would stop it. I had to reset it.
  • Nothing mysterious about it, just a little strange. The clock used a single-pole synchronous motor, so it could run equally well in either direction. It had a sweep second hand, so it looked pretty funny going backwards. There's a starting circuit that's supposed to give it a kick in the right direction when the power is applied, but it occasionally got it wrong anyway. Once it was running backwards, it would continue indefinitely. I liked to leave it that way, just to see who noticed.
    • My mum had a really expensive watch that did that.
      It was rather ammusing, but you should have seen the looks she got when she went to the jewelers to get it fixed.

      "it runs backwards.. uh huh.. are you sure its not upside down?"


  • The story so far:

    The office looses it's coffee service (Oh, the PAIN!) due to bankruptcy. On the flip side, we got our coffee contract back, along with a new coffee maker.

    It came back POSSESSED!!!

    I've been making coffee for years, and have made the first pot around 6am lately. But this new machine is wacked! After waking the machine up (lower left warmer switch to 'on' for brewing and spigot) and giving it a "spin-up" wait period before punching the spring-loaded "brew" toggle. The "break closet" fil
  • I used to have an 88 honda accord.

    I'd leave the car, and come back and I'd hear the radio playing. I'd *touch* the car and it would stop.

    Quite eerie.

    It would only play the radio at night, when it was lonely, and only until I touched it. I even checked to make sure the radio was off, before I turned off the car.

  • TI-86 (Score:3, Funny)

    by ee_moss ( 635165 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @07:35PM (#5641341)
    This is a short summary of a true story, whether or not the rest of my scientific-based-method friends believe it. I once had a TI-86 calculator type messages to me in the text editor on the calculator. The raw text would appear as if someone was pushing the letters without hitting the "alpha" key twice to lock the letters. So, it looked like a bunch of garbage on the display, sort of like this: E944-0-+23/| My friends would find a garbage looking message on the calculator and hit the alpha key twice, push the sequency of letters on the screen, and messages would come up saying "You must avenge my death. You are my troth. You must kill (insert random person here)" To that effect. We (friends and I) would type questions into the calculator, set it down on the table and stare at it for 2 minutes, and then pick it back up to see the response. Nobody was typing in the messages themselves, and we made sure of this by observing who handled the calculator and what they typed (score 1 for the scientific method). Every time we looked for a response, there was something more written there. One time I wrote in some equations to my calculator for a test, and as I was taking the test I was using those equations. Well, half way through the test my whole equation cheat sheet got deleted and replaced with the words "DON'T CHEAT." A friend sitting next to me looked at me at the same time with a confused look on his face. He asked if something had just happened to my calculator, because his just flashed the words "DIE" on the screen for a moment. Just a tid-bit I thought I'd throw in there. This scared the hell out of everybody, including a few teachers who witnessed the events over a course of 6 months (hopefully those teachers didn't witness those equations I wrote in my calculator ;). The thing that possessed the calculator didn't really say anything useful, just said it's name was "doomood" and it was obviously pretty upset because it wanted my friends and I to go kill people for it. I eventually started ignoring it, and it eventually stopped typing messages on my calculator. I'd say in the end, it was both entertaining and scary to everyone who encountered it. Some people don't believe the store (I'm sure some of you are like that) but everyone who was a first-hand witness won't deny it. Freaky TI-86's. Thank goodness I upgraded to the 89.
    • Ok, ill bite, so what did you do with it? I mean you didnt just magically upgrade to a new one. Do you have some fucking demon sitting in your desk drawer somewhere?

      In case you do I know someone (actually a few majik - pagan - idiots) who would love to buy it.

      • What I did with it (Score:2, Interesting)

        by ee_moss ( 635165 )
        Well, I didn't just magically upgrade to a new one. In my previous post, I didn't mention that it wasn't only the calculator that was writing strange messages. This was at least 5 years ago now, but I kept good documentation on everything so I could remember what happened later.

        My computer was also acting funny. For example, I'd come home to play a game of good old Warcraft II, and one of the computer opponents would start attacking the other computer opponents (something a skilled Warcraft II player
  • My Epson 777i seems to be possessed ever since I installed Slackware 9 with CUPS. When I print a document, the cursor does random things, like move around and click.

    I'm thinking about opening The Gimp and letting it draw little pictures for me. Hopefully nothing satanic..

  • Back when I first worked at Apple in a QA lab, we had a PowerBook which one day booted up with the Chimes of Death. We tried to power it down the hard way (hold the power button 5 seconds) and the thing just booted up again. So then we unplugged it and did the hard power off. It rebooted. So then we took out the battery and did a hard power off. It rebooted, but there wasn't enough power to keep it going so it shut down by itself...and rebooted. Eventually, the battery on the motherboard ran out of juice an
  • My scanner one day just stopped working. Of course, a year later (and after vigorously shaking the machine) it started working again.
  • Does intentional demon-like behavior count? At this moment I have a script running that calls my roommate at a random time between every 3 and 5 hours, lets the line ring once, and hangs up.

    I'm so glad we have seperate bedrooms.
  • and the stories within them, are a result of my h4k0rx5 5kI||5
  • About 6 years ago, we had some Sparc 10s acting as the NIS server. Each morning, about 7AM, it would spontaneously reboot. Nothing in the logs, no other information to tell us what happened, and it was on a UPS.

    But we figured out what the problem was.

    The local power company 'switched caps' at 7AM in the morning for the ramp up to the day's power usage. The UPS wasn't fast enough to supply power to the Sun, so it got a quick power blink and reboot.

    Strange thing was, if we took it off the UPS, it didn't
  • Just yesterday I was driving home from work and talking to my mother on a cell phone. The reception started getting worse, and I started to hear someone else talking, as in another conversation. I couldn't hear who the third person was talking to, but apparently some of the third person's data packets were mixing in with my incoming ones. Eventually, I was talking to the third person and not to my mother.

    "Uh, hello?"
    "Bill? You sound different."
    "This isn't Bill."
    "Would you put Bill back on, please?"
    "O

  • ...and I still haven't got an explanation for it.

    Several years ago, we rented and moved into house owned by the parents of my brother-in-law. This house was a hand built extraveganza of parts, sitting on several acres of land out in the (then - it was built in the early 1970's) desert of north Phoenix, Arizona (today, a lot of other stuff has grown up around it - but the land is worth a lot, due to a new freeway having been built to the immediate south of it - but I digress).

    My brother-in-law's father, at t

  • I have a video card, an nVidia TNT2 if you are curious, which developed a weird behavior. When it is installed in a computer, that computer will not power up unless there is a monitor attached to the video card. If you try to run the computer headless it just doesn't power on.
    I tried reseating the card, tried removing and reinstalling it, even moved it to another computer. If there was no monitor attached, the computer would not power on.

    The monitor didn't need to be turned on, or even plugged into the
  • When I was in training to be a dorm based computer consultant one of the exercises was to fix a computer that the instructor had purposely messed up in some way. We were not told in advance what the problem would be. I entered the clusted went to my assigned computer. It was shutdown so I pressed the power button on the keyboard (it was a Mac) and it booted up fine. I couldn't figure out what the problem was with it. Other people had computers that wouldn't even boot in some way. I quickly became bore
  • My sister use to have a hair dryer that would turn on and off! Many wonderful memories do I have of her trying to do her hair with that thing. Eventually she threw it away, but I think that was more my mother's idea so no one got hurt.
  • We had a cisco isdn router that was somehow caching pages and giving 404 errors if you hit any existing pages, but letting newly created pages through.

    The thing was definately possessed because this behavior was consistent across multiple OS and web servers!

    We replaced it and everything was fine. Still can't figure out what the heck was going on that day.
  • So I'm studying in the canteen in the basement of the dorm where lived for a year. I did this 3-4 times per week. It's about 1AM. Suddenly, the soda machine buzzes & poops out 6 cans of Coca-cola. Drinks around for everyone. Only time this ever happened.
  • My father's old PC would occasionally refuse to boot.
    regardless of what he did, the only way to make it boot again was for me to be standing in the room when he turned it on.

    But everyone knows that as soon as the repair guy shows up, everythign starts working again.
  • I had an electric kettle that would turn itsself on occasionally for no reason.

    I had to keep it unplugged because of this. I suspect that it had a faulty switch

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