Slashdot Mirror
Possessed Technology?
gordlea asks: "Has anyone ever had a gadget that has acted in a seemingly possessed manner, or that seemed to have a personality of it's own? We once owned a Panasonic fax/phone/answering machine. This thing was crazy, it would randomly call up people who had called our place recently and play back messages other people had left for us. Occasionally it would even record our conversations and play them back to people who called when we weren't around! So do you have any good anecdotes along similar lines? I'm looking forward to hearing them!"
heheh, ok although all thease fake stories are funny it would have been better if they had temporarily set it to show everyone as haveing bad karma (though not so it affected the weightings of posts just showed as being bad :-)
posessed technology..... ehhhe
Slashdot - The one stop shop for procrastination
I once had a television set that would turn itself on or off every night at 2am, then again 9 minutes later. Accept on May the 7th for some strange reason. It died in my last move and did not give a rats ass about time zones or daylight savings time. So the time it did it's thing would flux with what ever was going on time zone wise. Just to kill your ideas of what was going on, this tv did not have a remote or any kind of digital timing device or service. It was just your run of the mill tv.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
Despite today's date, this is a true story. If I was going to make something up, I wouldn't have chosen a story this lame.
My grandmother suffered from senile dementia, so she would forget that she was talking to an answering machine. Well, every time it hung up on her, she would call back to yell at my mother (whose voice was on the answering machine message) for hanging up. The end result was that we would leave to go to dinner (yes, I was living with my parents, but I was seven, so it's not forgivable), we would come back and there would be twenty-some messages from her. Well, for about a month after she passed away, any time we would go anywhere, we would come home to find twenty odd messages on the machine. They would all be blank, but it was still kind of creepy.I had an intro to programming class once, one of the assignments was to demonstrate random number generation- randomly generate an x,y,and color for a pixel, then draw it.
The person sitting behind me started theirs up and it drew a perfect nazi flag, except the background was white and the circle was red, instead of the normal way
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Anyway, the system would randomly call not only the vendor, but the cell-phones of the road-warriors, too. Made for some horrific bills.
So I am at work late one night, programming my little heart out, and my telephone rings. I pick it up, hear the clicks of lines being accessed, and then hear ringing.
"Hello."
"Hello."
"What did you want?"
"Did you call me?"
"No. You called me."
"Actually, my phone rang, and I picked it up, and am now talking to you."
"I'm hanging up now."
"Good night."
"(click)"
The whole dictation thing lasted about a month.
And then I have the story about it prank calling me every 60 seconds while I was on receptionist duty....
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
Well, I didn't just magically upgrade to a new one. In my previous post, I didn't mention that it wasn't only the calculator that was writing strange messages. This was at least 5 years ago now, but I kept good documentation on everything so I could remember what happened later.
;)
My computer was also acting funny. For example, I'd come home to play a game of good old Warcraft II, and one of the computer opponents would start attacking the other computer opponents (something a skilled Warcraft II player would know doesn't happen). The computer started typing binary messages on the screen (which I took screen shots of). I started typing back to it, telling it to talk in english, and it said the same thing as my TI-86... go kill someone, you must avenge my death, blah blah blah, you will die, you must surrender immediately, etc. etc. etc. It was even calling me by name. My computer wasn't even connected to the internet, so it wasn't someone else getting into my machine. The computer ended up cheating a lot (i.e. ogres in the first minute of the game, that really pissed me off) and I got freaked out and deleted the game. Yes, it was a sad day. Never had any trouble with starcraft though
So the point of telling you all that was to show that it wasn't only my calculator that was getting possessed, but also other electronic equipment around me (printers also went nuts when I walked into a computer lab, room, etc.) Well with the calcalator, I started to resist the temptation to translate the messages on my screen and started deleting them. After a week or two of doing this, I started getting fewer and fewer messages, until finally it kind of just stopped happening. I continued to use my TI-86 calculator for quite some time after that, until that fateful day when it fell off my desk and broke the screen. That's when I decided to give in and get the TI-89.
Moral of the story: Don't talk back to electronic equipment, because everyone's gonna think that you and the 10 people that interacted with it are all nuts.