The Daily Funny - 22nd April 2010

Tales from the Voodoo Files

I was an AV nerd in school, and naturally, I ended up in computer support as an adult. One instance I remembered from my high school days was how I was unofficially "on call" whenever something broke in my school. "Get Grig, he'll fix that VCR/projector/film strip..."

I was in my Chemistry honors class. We had one room for lab work, and one room for watching films. This was an advanced class taught during the summer, so it was 5 weeks of six-hour classes. Sometimes, we had to watch like 5 or 6 films in a row, our classes were so accelerated. Typical of you education dollar at work, the films were antiques, some had been spliced hundreds of times, some so far they were actually missing the first few minutes of the film. Many of the films were old acetate, and were brittle and faded. They often broke in the projector, usually when loading. My professor finally had me do it, and I became this unofficial projectionist for the class. One day, one particular film was agonizingly brittle, yet for some reason the professor thought it was vital to see it. After a lot of swearing and cursing, trying to get this film to stop flipping the image all over the screen, I finally saw the humor of the situation, and became dramatic. I started hurling creative curses aloud, blaming evil spirits, and vowed I would drive the evil spirits away from the projector. I grabbed some ancient Chinese spirit bells the professor had hanging over the doorway, and waved them around, chanting gibberish, and making a big production out of it. Finally, after two minutes of this "act," I flipped the projector on, having some BS speech ready in my head about stubborn demons and would give up until a preacher was called.

But damned if it didn't work flawlessly. In fact, for the rest of the year, that projector never had any problems again.

Since then, on rare occasions, when nothing else has worked, I have tried this, with mixed success. Mostly failures. One spectacular failure happened at this retail place I used to work. We had this AT&T Merlin phone system that was constantly freezing. Since we weren't some big-name company (and only had two lines), it would take forever to get a tech on the site. After watching the techs work, I figured out how to fix most problems that occurred, and one day when it froze again, I was in a goofy mood, and told an employee I was going to chase evil spirits out of our phone system. I grabbed a "spirit rattle" (a wooden baby rattle we sold), and pretended to "work magic" on the system. I reset some switches, and the phone system came back up. Although this was meant purely as humor, one employee became very afraid of me, stating that I was working with "demons," and my boss bragged to everyone I had magic powers and "practiced witchcraft in the store." At first, I thought they were just teasing and joking with me, so I went along with it. But much later (after I left) I found out the head office had this in my file, with concerned comments from management about how to handle things with me in the future. I found my district manager was afraid he'd be turned into a frog. Some feared I was a member of a cult, and feared I'd pull a religious descrimination suit if they fired me.... or worse.

Since then, I have been more careful with my "magic." :)

Thanks to: Grig Larson

 

From www.TechTales.com August 1999