My wife believes in "Hexes"

[eleanorigby]

@TroubleAgain

Nah, not a haunting. That’s obviously an evil alien from Star Trek about to take over that lady’s body.

It’s a tribble? :eek:

[Maastricht]

The belief that perfectly usable furniture is hexed, doesn’t seem to differ that much from believing that perfectly usable furniture is “out of style” or “not your style”. Such an “out of style”-table will make visitors think badly of you, instantly. It’s almost magic.

[iamthewalrus_3]

@Jurph

Also: system test engineers that I know talk about getting a “gremlin” board in the shop, which passes all of its tests (but only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, only when the moon isn’t full, only when it’s raining outside, only when a female does the testing, etc.). All of them must have rational explanations (bug takes 48 hours to manifest, extra light makes an optical junction marginal, humidity shorts a pin, long hair creates a little bit more static that drives a weak voltage higher) but the explanations are sketchy at best. Easier to lump them together, call the part “marginal” (or “plagued with gremlins”) and fail it for inconsistency.

We often refer to hardware that fails mysteriously (or, in the worse cases, works mysteriously) as having an on-board cache of miniature goats to be sacrificed. We joke about someday attempting to do something with one of those unreliable boards and getting back “System failure: No more goats.”

I think there’s even a warning that pops up on our own tools if you select some alpha setup that suggests that you sacrifice a chicken to your preferred deity before going any further.

[Yorikke]

@user_hostile

I’ve used these devices for years to ward off evil. Hasn’t failed yet, since I discovered them in high school electronics. It was the '77 or '78 April issue of Popular Electronics which led me to this important discovery.

Christ, warn us before linking to a .pdf, please

Joe

[Anne_Neville]

@wheresgeorge04

Christ, warn us before linking to a .pdf, please

So… pdf’s… are a device for warding off evil? And you were warded off by a pdf?

Then YOU MUST BE EVIL!!! Burn the witch!