Comment by vghaisas 3 days ago
I've collected a list of fun stories of this form and post them when this comes up:
- Car allergic to vanilla ice cream: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wkw/humour/carproblems.txt
- Can't log in when standing up: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52p...
- OpenOffice won't print on Tuesdays: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...
It's worth noting that sometimes (incorrect) keyboard maps can get in the way.
If it's a key that you may not often type and one that is often transposed between regions, the fact that the entered char is not shown can lead to frustration.
e.g. " and @ are in different positions in UK vs. US keyboards. So user thinks they are typing @, but " goes into the box.
One of the more annoying things I've found moving country is the unavailability of keyboards / laptops with the layout I grew up with. I find it especially annoying as the country I'm from uses a US layout which I naively assumed would be easily available everywhere (and it is available but not without a long delivery and a premium price)
Side note: helping my French housemate with his uni assignments was an experience, none of the symbols were where I expected them to be
Meh, takes you like some days to get used to another layout being visible on the keys, while your OS (and brain) actually using another layout.
I've used US keyboard layout since I started programming (my first mentor essentially forced me to switch to it, he was right about it being easier), but throughout the years been using Swedish, Norwegian, British, Spanish and French physical keyboards, never cleanly mapped to the actual layout I've used on the OS, and never been an issue.
The last part though, is a real one, trying to pair program with Spanish programmers always have at least one moment of holding Shift and sliding the finger across all numbers to see where that specific symbol actually is.
On other layouts that isn't enough. For example French keyboards are AZERTY, not QWERTY. and here in Sweden we have å, ä and ö next to the (tall) enter key, instead of the symbols US and UK have.
(Side note: those are not a and o with diacretics, they are entirely separate letters in the alphabets of the Nordic countries, with entirely different sounds.)
I’ve done this before as well. It truly baffled me because of how much in undermined me sense of being totally aware of my body. I truly believed I was hitting the right keys (I know how to type after all) and I never noticed any issue when writing normally, but only when typing my password. But of course I couldn’t see my password as I typed, while in other cases I would subconsciously correct any resulting typos because I could see them. I had no reason to classify typos due to standing as any different than the regular errors I might make while typing.
Almost felt like a bug in error correction loop in my brain, or maybe more like an unconsidered edge case.
I somes subconsciously correct typos even when not looking at them. It drives me crazy when UI design breaks this, like fixed-length security code / PIN entry UIs that automatically submit when you enter the last character of the code.
I also tend to memorize long (8+ digit) PINs based on the physical layout of the keys, so if I need to enter a PIN set up on a phone-style keypad on a normal keyboard or numeric keypad, or vice versa, I need to visualize entering the PIN on the original input device to remember it.
- We can’t send an email more than 500 miles
Here's another for your collection.
- Putting the car in reverse sets off the neighbor's home security system. https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/7k12fs/neighbors_hous...
You can add this one to the list: https://old.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/7p09ay/i_shit...
Office chairs are turning monitors on and off.
This is actually officially documented on the DisplayLink website as well: https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/73861...
Can't send email more than 500 miles away: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
And my personal favorite, "more magic": https://web.archive.org/web/20260103114654/http://www.catb.o...
Also this one, which originally came from Usenet days:
https://old.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/cp48t...
This one about a singly-wired switch is in the same vein:
In addition to the others people have mentioned, I'd add "Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain"[0]
[0] https://www.jakepoz.com/debugging-behind-the-iron-curtain/
Here you have another one, although is not named like that: https://web.archive.org/web/20241112052925/https://cohost.or...
In a very strange coincidence, I happened to read that first story in a book[1] I'm reading, just last night! What are the chances?
Obligatory mention of David J. Agans's "Debugging: The 9 Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems" where you can find dozens of such stories, including why their computer crashes when you wear a certain green T-shirt.
Listening to Janet Jackson crashes hard drives https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2022-38392
Ok I swear I had a printer that would do some kind of internal cleaning noise thing every time I plugged something else in to a 120v outlet anywhere in the same apartment. I never really tried to figure it out.
It's an urban legend that's floated around in various forms: in some it's an ice cream parlor rather than a store and they pack the vanilla faster, in some it's only the vanilla that gets hand-packed so it takes longer, it's pistachio that takes longer and triggers the problem, or butter pecan.
Snopes covered this one and they cite to an urban legends book from 1989: "Curses, Broiled Again" by Jan Harold Brunvand. Brunvand prints the "vanilla takes longer" version and reports also having a "pistachio takes longer" version printed in a magazine in 1978, which itself referred to another magazine as its source. In the book's version it's a Texas car dealer who's looking into the problem. The same author's later book from 1999 covers the story again and includes versions dating back further, plus a 1992 version which is this one where it's Pontiac and the problem is the vanilla being in a separate case at the front of the store.
In the Pontiac version you can go and pick at various implausible details stacked up together, that Pontiac's president cares enough to send an engineer out, that the engineer is there when the car won't start on the first night but still just comes back many more times rather than looking at the car or presumably noticing that it starts a couple minutes later, that this guy is buying a new container of ice cream every night and never stocking up, that he never takes any other trip where it's a short stop... You can go on each of those and say they do happen: like presidents and CEOs do sometimes go digging deep on random problems customers put in front of them. But if you look at the whole thing I think you need to recognize it as a piece of storytelling, not fact.
Maybe there's some kernel of a true story in there, but if so it's probably a pretty small kernel. Anyway it doesn't matter much: it's just a fun story that teaches a little lesson so people like to share it around.
> Can't log in when standing up
This reminds me of a recent issue I had. I had just gotten a new laptop from IT. While picking it up from them, I had generated myself a password, put it in my password manager on my phone, and then entered it twice to set it on the laptop. Everything worked great. But when I got back to my desk, the password didn't work! I tried a bunch of times, watched myself hit each key to eliminate typos, etc.
I went back to IT and they asked me to demonstrate. But this time it worked! I walked back to my desk, thoroughly embarrassed. But a couple hours later I had to log in again and once again could not.
After thinking about it for awhile, I realized that I was typing at IT while standing over a sitting-height desk. Sure enough, typing in that position fixed my issue. I carefully watched what I was doing this time - something about the exact layout of the keyboard and the weird angle I was typing at ensured that I was making a particular typo I typed in that position - just a single letter switched to another, every time. Sure enough, making that one substitution to my intended password got me in.