A guy I work with has the uncanny ability to fix things via telepathy. I’ll send him a note about such-and-such not working and instead is delivering XYZ error, he’ll respond that he can’t replicate the error and will come over to my desk … and sure enough, while he’s watching over my shoulder, such-and-such works exactly as it should. While I appreciate the problem going away, it’s still kind of maddening! (Also, makes me question my sanity and probably makes me look a touch incompetent.)
I’ve gotten him back, though. When I’m watching over his shoulder as he does some task, twice now it hasn’t worked for him.
If this doesn’t have a name already, it should. C’mon, Dopers … whaddya got?
I don’t know what he’s doing to you, but German has a word for what you’re doing: Fisselig. a temporary state of inexactitude and sloppiness elicited by another person’s nagging, i.e., failing at something you can normally do, just because somebody is standing there watching you.
Fisselig! That’s fabulous. Next time my boss gets naggy, I’m going to say “oy, you’re giving me Fisselig!” (that wouldn’t be proper in German, but it would be perfect Yinglish."
I don’t understand the phenomenon – but I definitely have experienced it. I was a computer repair guy for a pretty large corporation, and, yes, problems tended to disappear when I was present and users wanted to demonstrate them to me. It felt eerie; as if I had a magic aura that caused things to work better nearby me.
Illusory, obviously, but still eerie.
(That and my adamantium vorpal +4 Gremlin hammer…)
I, too, used to be in tech support and experienced the “it was doing it until you go here” phenomenon many times. It happened just this week, in fact, with a printer that had stopped working on Monday night, worked fine the minute I looked into the problem on Tuesday morning.
I used to tell people my Leatherman tool was the source of the mojo, and sometimes leave it with them if they had a time-critical task to perform. True story.
Oh man. My workplace has been struggling with horrible computer, printer and telephone issues. Last week they had us keep a log to document everything. I din’t have one freaking problem to log all week long. The week before chaos. Pisses me off.
I used to have a car with a radio that would only work if my son turned it on.
Intermittently, computers and gadgets will work for him when I’m sure I did the exact same thing - multiple times. Sometimes all he has to do is come in from the other room.
I took a computer class with a guy whose programs never worked for him - if I did exactly the same thing, it worked every time. One of those mysteries of life.
I used to have a coworker who could crash stuff just by touching it. He never manhandled anything, if anything, he was overly careful. His care was justified, because if something was going to break…it would do it in his hands. I was once showing him how to do something on the computer, with Joe asking before clicking every single time…and he crashed the server.
It got to the point that the IT people wouldn’t even bother to ask which workstation had gone down. They would go straight to Joe’s.
