It is Murphy’s law at work!
AKA The perverse nature of inannimate objects.
Now that I think about it, isn’t the exact oposite of Murphy’s Law? Everything that should go wrong, doesn’t.
I call this phenomenon snuffleupagation, after Mr. Snuffleupagus, the large fur-bearing mammal from Sesame Street who disappears whenever anybody but Big Bird comes around.
This word was too clever for The Atlantic Monthly.
It could be called “life” or “to be expected”.
[Slight digression] Some machines are possessed. A car I sold a friend wouldn’t start for her now and then. No crank-nada. It always started and ran for me-Christine like.[/Sd]
In German it’s called Vorführeffekt (i.e. demonstration effect).
I call it an intermittent problem or user error.
My Dad used to work at a car factory, later at a TV factory.
He claimed that machines develop personalities as they age; the more complex and advanced the machine is, the faster it develops a personality and the crankiest it gets. They hate us, you know.
So that kind of behaviour is known in my family as a “machine tantrum”. They only throw tantrums with those humans they know.
I think it’s really that the machines can sense who’s near them. When they sense someone who’s going to put on an amusing hissy fit, they’ll act up. As soon as the person who knows how to open up the machine and mess with its tender innards approaches, they behave properly.
As a corrolarry, they also can sense the urgency of a person’s need. Copiers will never jam at 11 AM, but they will go bonkers at 4:55 without fail.
I’ve heard it called Willoughby’s Law (sp?): “When attempting to show someone a machine doesn’t work, it does.”
I don’t recall where I first heard it, but I’ve always known this as “demonstration effect”:
When attempting to demonstrate a problem to anyone with the ability to either diagnose or repair the problem, the problem will refuse to manifest itself.
Corrilary 1: Said problem will reappear immediatly when the repairman leaves.
Corrilary 2: Regardless of the testing applied to a new product or program, at least one significant problem will manifest itself the first time it is demonstrated for the customer.
What ever you call it, I have seen it hundreds of times.
I the customer drops a car off and I test drive it, and NFF, or normal op a complaint they claim that I didn’t even look.
The only time I get revenge is when I ask them to take me for a drive and demo the fault. When it does not reappear, I welcome them to my world.
Is there a name for the phenomenon where you selectively remember certain things, so that there seems to be a pattern? [eg. “Everytime I flip the channels and A Christmas Story is on, it’s always on the scene where the kid’s got his face in his plate of food like a pig.” No, you just don’t remember all the times when you ran across that movie on another scene.*] I think that this is a combination of that phenomenon and an Intermittant Error.
There were probably a few times when the repairman came, saw the problem, fixed it and left; and you forgot about it. There were probably several times when it didn’t work, and you rebooted/kicked it/took a smoke/pee break/etc. and came back and it worked; and then you forgot about it. You only remember the times that you described in the OP.
- I’m curious to know if anybody knows where I got that example from?
I remember one Friday morning over the summer of junior year (I was living on campus because I was doing research for a professor), I awoke to find the AC not working. I put in a call to Facilities and Maintenance to get them to fix it. No way I was going to be in a dorm room in Southern CA with no AC over the weekend in late July. I called them later that day to see if someone had gotten to it, and they told me that no one had.
I arrived home furious—only to find that the AC was blasting cool air. I saw a note under the door. It was a note from the repairman, saying he didn’t have time, but would be back Monday morning to fix the problem.
You all know the end of this story. Monday evening came, and the place was an oven. And it took them three days to get them to come back and unbreak it.
I think it is just that machines are scared of the maintainer…
That’s one of the more obscure ways to get to Death Valley from just about anywhere. Do you live in Ridgecrest or there abouts?
NFF is a bit BOFHish. I use ‘Unable to reproduce fault’.
I’ve called the power possesed by those in whose presence a machine will always work the FOG factor (as in the Fear Of God). Machines will always work in the presence of one who has FOG, because the machine will know that that person will have no qualms about taking a hammer or screwdriver to it and fix the problem/attitude.
Vlad/Igor
BOFH? 
Bastard Operator From Hell.
Sorry for the double post but I found the BOFH referenced on Wikipedia: