Easter Eggs in Appliances?

nneul asks: "A few weeks ago I bought and installed a new Kenmore Elite dishwasher from Sears. A couple days ago, it stopped working, all the buttons on the panel would just blink when pushed, and pressing "start" would run this weird mini-wash cycle. Disconnecting the power to the unit had no effect. Turns out (after having Sears come out for a warrantee repair on it), through some sequence of keypresses on the panel, I had enabled "store demo mode", which required a completely undocumented set of keypresses to turn off. (Even the sears guy had to call to get the code). My question - has anyone else ever seen other appliance "easter eggs" like this? In this case, it was pretty annoying, but I wonder what other sort of interesting secret key sequences there are on ordinary home appliances/tvs/etc." Makes you wonder. If you start pushing random buttons on your microwave, don't be surprised if it suddenly starts up with a rousing rendition of Devo's "Whip It!"

Comments

Nothing new

[Em Ellel]

"Easter eggs" like this outside PC's are a common thing. I mean these started on console games. But I do not thing this even qualifies as an "easter egg". Demo modes are common in many appliances. They are usually well documented thogh.

My Sony TV has a "service tunning mode" (it's amaizing how much you can mess with the unit) My TiVo has some hidden controlls, as well as a special combo that sends in close captioning names of the people who worked on it. My car stereo has a demo mode that comes the first time you power the unit up. Pretty much anything controlled by any sort of soft/firm-ware of any sort can have these "tunable" parameters and other hidden functions.

I used to own an old RCA TV. This particular model had no remote, but almost identical one with a few extra features did. Universal remotes did not work. So I opened it up. Sure enough it had IR recievers covered up in black tape. You never know.

-Em