So, we had this stupid meeting Saturday (yesterday) morning at work. The subject of system performance and reliability came up. Someone who’s been here long enough to know better made the comment “Oh, well, things seem to be getting better…The system hasn’t crashed in a couple of months…” I tried to knock on wood, but the conference room furniture is all metal and plastic. Three guess what happened within the next 4 hours and you won’t need more than one guess…That’s right…CRASH! <insert sound of glass breaking here> <insert screams of the damned here>
I finished the recovery process a couple of hours ago that was started at about 3:00 p.m. So that is almost exactly 12 hours to bring the damned thing back up. (Well, could have been 10 hours, but we had a 2 hour maint. scheduled for tonight anyway, so we went ahead and did that, too.)
We were giving the guy a hard time about his comment and he said “Oh, I don’t believe in that stuff…” Well, I don’t believe in it, either, but… I’ve seen that kind of thing happen way too often, like all you good Dopers that go around killing celebrities…
Not to be depressing, but the first time I ever heard that expression was when my mom had gone crazy and woke everyone up one evening in the middle of the night. As my dad tried to usher her out of the hallway she kept screaming “Look God! I’m knocking on wood, do you hear it?” quite an amusing eve.
As for the computers, mine has decided at workto only partially fill out the windows that we open. So we have to blindly guess where the text areas are. And our techs aren’t here on Sundays. Ahhhh… technology at its best I suppose.
troubleagain, for future reference, should anyone utter a jinx and there is no wood about, a blood sacrifice will work. the blood must come from the jinxer and be sprinkled on the jinxee; in your example that would be a computer, or computer room housing the network. it may not total dejinx that which was jinxed, it will stop any future jinxes from bing spoken. goodness that was an exercise in the conj. of jinx.
People, people, people–this slavish devotion to an old superstition is quite amusing. Don’t you realize that at the time that “knock on wood” first came into human consciousness, mankind was surrounded by wood–thus the wood gods were very powerful and could help avert trouble when envoked. Now, we are surrounded by plastic and plasterboard, by faux stone and simulated leather. We must call of the gods of these items–gods that have strength in today’s world–to enlist their aid in preventing daily catastrosphe. Your belief in their effectiveness is all that is lacking, blood is not needed. So, the next time someone unmindfully creates a potential “bad thing” knock on whatever is handy, and evoke that god’s name (i.e. say “knock plastic” instead of “knock wood”–you did know you had to say what you were knocking inorder for anything to happen, didn’t you?). Oh, and remember to knock three times only.
