Can an email go 500 miles in 2025?

I collected a list of fun stories of this form a while ago!

- 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...

- The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining: https://predr.ag/blog/wifi-only-works-when-its-raining/

“WiFi doesn’t work in the summer” is one of the first anecdotes I learned about WiFi when it was still brand new. You set up WiFi between two buildings in the winter, spring comes and the water in the leaves blocks the signal.

Monitor switches off when I sit down deserves to be on that list (even if it's hardware, not software): https://old.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/2rsivw/monitor...

This also happens with satellite TV.

It's not quite in the same league as any of this, but when I was a child, we sent our Commodore 64 in for repairs several times because it started "writing" by itself. Gibberish would slowly appear as if someone was randomly hitting the keyboard.

Each time it took several days before they repair centre got to it, and they then contacted us to tell us there was nothing wrong with the computer at all.

After we picked it up, eventually, when it started happening again for the third or fourth time, we realised the problem:

The "large" (a whopping 26") CRT TV we'd recently started placing it under when not in use caused it... A few days away from the TV to dishcharge it, and it was fine - hence why the repair technician didn't find anything.

- A Story About ‘Magic' http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

This site has a collection of them: https://500mile.email/

I once had a desktop computer that had great uptime, but started to consistently crash when I got up and left the room to get a drink of water.

Turns out it was old building with loose floorboards. The vibrational force of standing up was enough to short out a failing power supply. As long as I sat my desk, it was fine.

But I had a co-worker who had a worse problem with getting up to get a drink of water. Once while she was kitchen, an eight foot steel lighting ballast came loose from the ceiling and felt right onto her chair.That what-if memory still haunts me.

> The vibrational force of standing up was enough to short out a failing power supply

Or, was it?

https://superuser.com/questions/1406140/monitor-screen-that-...

(not disclaiming that it wasn't, but that "chair piston causes EM surge" had me driven crazy for the longest time til I was able to pinpoint the cause)

I wonder if the feeling is excitement or horror when you encounter one of these weird problems that seems like it has to be the user.

Not computer related really, but I'm reminded of when my Mom was helping set up macs in the lab at my middle school. I, a 4th grader, tagged along and hung out in the other lab across the hall. I got very incredulous looks when i claimed that there was a lizard in there. It was the Midwest over summer break! I was obviously a kid seeing things. There's no lizards here.

Then I produced it, caught under a bin. It was a brown anole that had come back in a plant sent from Florida. I wasn't crazy that day.

I had one of these myself. WiFi wouldn’t work when my wife was using her laptop in bed. As soon as she gave it to me, it started working again. She thought it was the magic touch of the engineer, but it turned out that when she was in bed, she pulled her knees up and set the computer on her lap, while I would lay down completely and let the computer rest on my chest. Her knees blocked the WiFi signal enough to be quite noticeable.

I saw this in an office while working on an embedded project where our dev boards had no EM shielding.

Standing up from the chair was enough to cause it to crash.

there's also the story that wiggling the mouse in Win95 when installing something really does make it go faster. https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why...

I’ve seen some weird technical glitches in my career. One that i will always remember is that a customer was very happy with his new big computer, but could not work for multiple hours on it, because his office would get colder and colder when he kept using it. After some mailing and talking over the phone i suggested a visit to his office where i quickly found the cause of the problem: The big computer fan was aimed directly at the thermostat knob of the radiator, so it assumed the entire office was well heated and closed.

There also is the (somewhat) famous caps lock gamble in XCOM 2 [1].

Quote: "Hitting the key, through a rube-goldberg-esque series of events, forces all outstanding load requests to be filled immediately in a single frame. This causes a massive hitch, and potentially could crash the game. If you don't care about those adverse effects the synchronous load is faster."

[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/a-single-button-press-skips-loadin...

At one point, my scanner only worked when my daughter was awake - never when she was asleep (nighttime or napping).

Since you mentioned your mom, mine is not as tech savvy. At one point she needed a computer to type something and print it, a simple use case so I came up with this idea of setting up a computer that would give me no tech support trouble, since I was living in another state. I installed CentOS, libre office and made sure the printer was supported.

I told my mom to keep the system up to date and set up an ssh connection for remote access just in case.

A few months go by and one day I receive a phone call that she cannot find the system updater shortcut anymore. I started to think how I could get Gnome to load over ssh, I was sure she moved the icon accidentally or something but decided to google it just in case.

Lo and behold and there is a bug report that due to some bug in package management dependency resolution the graphic software updater GUI could remove… itself… if the user performed a routine system update. It seemed to even affect RHEL at the time if I’m not mistaken.

A yum install command away over ssh and it was solved but that was the day I realized that no matter how stable a distro is famed to be or how much support it has from a company, there was still lots of work to be done until Linux could be seen as friendly enough for the end user.

Most of these are good, but "can't log in while standing up" is just too implausible. I can't possibly be led to believe that every single one of a whole group of technically-literate touch typers failed to notice that keys were swapped.

As seen on HN:

Car allergic to vanilla ice cream: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37584399 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13347852

The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39896371

It seems pretty easy to overlook. Especially because the correct position is alphabetically backwards.

I don't know about that conclusion. Windows will occasionally break itself worse than that.

I know this story is a bit unrelated, but your story brought it to mind (probably the keywords child, repaired several times, etc): When I was a kid my father had a Nokia 3310. Any early Nokia owner would remember how you could configure your own 'welcome message', which would flash up on the phone's monochrome screen for a second while it boots. My Dad was an engineer, and would get totally hung up on the minutiae of anything technical. Picture him spending a totally inappropriate amount of time adjusting the TV's audio settings, for instance. One day I thought I'd play a prank on him, and changed the welcome message on his phone to say 'SIM CARD ERROR'. It sent him completely bananas, and triggered this huge quest to remedy the problem. He ended up taking it back to the local Vodafone store where he bought it multiple times, and they couldn't figure out what was wrong either. Maybe they got the joke and thought it was too funny, who knows. The store ended up escalating the case to Nokia and authorised an RMA. At which point I figured the joke had gone too far, and I reset the welcome message to 'Dad's Phone'. For some reason, he was happy just to leave it at that. I never confessed what I'd done! It caused way too much fuss, and I'd have been absolutely in for it if anyone figured it out!

That reminds me of one. I had a PC that would fail to boot the first time every day. Second and subsequent times were fine, until the next day.

When it stopped happening in the spring, and started again in the fall, it became obvious -- my apartment was too cold. The heat from the first failed boot sufficiently heated up the system to boot the second time.

Canadian winter for you, I guess.

The little ssh that (sometimes) couldn't: https://mina.naguib.ca/blog/2012/10/22/the-little-ssh-that-s...

Discussed also here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4709438