Comment by drivers99

2 years ago

Definitely an urban legend at this point. A reddit thread[0] mentions it being collected in 1990 from computer stories going around in the 80s[1]

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/5yrs1...

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3227607-the-devouring-fu...

42 comments

drivers99

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joshvm  2 years ago

I mean it actually happens. Not powering down the actual machine, but in my last house the landlord had a cleaner visit every fortnight. Occasionally I came home to find downloads broken or my remote connection would drop randomly in the afternoon. We lived in an old house and had a wifi extender to reach the upper floors (and not enough sockets). The cleaner would unplug the extender to vacuum the kitchen and half the house would go offline.

The ice cream story reads too much like a dramatisation to be truly believable, but accidental and repeated unplugging is common I expect.

kalleboo  2 years ago

I think the vacuum story gets retold because it's so close to real-life stories.

The UPS on a server I manage would trip once a week around the same time. The old story came to mind and sure enough, once a week it was time to vacuum and someone would plug in a vacuum cleaner into the same circuit (700W vacuum cleaner on a 100V/15A circuit), causing enough voltage dip to kick the UPS into gear.

btilly  2 years ago

The version that I remember hearing was https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/polished-off/. Also false.

  • Paul-Craft  2 years ago

    I've never heard that one. It has many more characteristics of a modern urban legend than the simple "janitor unplugs the server then plugs it back in" story. Urban legends are essentially modern day folk tales. They'll often involve fear, horror, or even humor, and they're frequently cast as cautionary tales. They tend to be reasonably detailed (which helps keep a listener's attention), but at the same time they frequently not pinned down to a specific time or place. They're almost always told as secondhand stories (e.g. it happened to "a friend of a friend"), and tend to fall at the edge of plausibility.

    But, the key thing is that urban legends always reflect some sort of underlying societal belief or worry. "Janitor polishes off patients" is about the fear of death, and how it can come for anyone at any time, and there's nothing they can do about it. "Janitor unplugs server every night at 5" is probably more about the idea that strange things happen sometimes, but it usually turns out that there's a good explanation.

drzaiusapelord  2 years ago

Essentially all these stories are apocryphal. Even this vapor lock story.

Sorry but even before today, having a automotive engineer sent to a random person's home over what clearly sounds like a quack letter seems implausible to me. The dictates of capitalism, human resources, and the politics of the workplace would make this difficult if not impossible. Even in the past when there was more human capital in support positions and more of a sense of customer service.

Way, way too many suspicious stories involve high-level people being involved in trivial issues. I just find it all pretty suspicious. Real stories tend to start with poor customer service at the dealership and being mocked by managers and mechanics. Not some unrealistic ideal white knight manager sending off engineers to people's homes. Imagine how many weird letters a place like pontiac gets. They don't have the manpower to do this if they actually chose to do it, and engineers might balk at the idea of doing at-home support too.

Pretty much any "idealized Americana" business story should set off BS alarms in us. "Oh a trivial problem with your car? No problem ma'am, I'm sending our top engineers over tomorrow," doesn't happen because its costly and unsustainable. Instead ask anyone who has odd car problems. Its endless painful calls and visits to dealerships and mechanics. There's a reason we have lemon laws for cars. Its because whats described in this story doesn't actually happen and people demand restitution.

I don't doubt that someone had a famous vapor lock shopping story (ive heard different versions of this story, usually about a housewife picking up her child from a nearby elementary school), but over the years these stories get modified into memetic structures based on dishonesty because most people are social capital seeking and having a humorous story provides them the immature ego boost they need. So "wow my car had vapor lock when I make quick trips" became "So the CEO of Ford came to my house to look at my ice cream car..." The latter is just more interesting in the market of storytelling.

That is to say, the ONLY reason this story is here is because its been modified to be memeticly attractive. A "boring" (i find old technology faults interesting, personally), but a "boring" story about vapor lock wouldn't make it to places like HN or reddit, which are memetic responders (upvote/downvote mechanisms) and lowest-common denominator (by this demographic) popularity machines. But dress up that boring story and now everyone is repeating it, often times claiming its their story and they know the people in it! The same way the comment you're responding to probably doesn't actually know the famous "unplug the server at 5pm" person.

  • Tangurena2  2 years ago

    I used to work for General Motors as a field engineer. Basically, I was the "mechanic of last resort" for some issues. The most certain method of getting something fixed was to write a letter to someone at the top, or very close to the top. When the request rolled downhill to "fix this", no one knew if this was a whim or something serious (like it was the CEO's neighbor). So those service requests got absolute priority.

    I remember one incident where that "fix it" letter came from high enough that I drove out to the customer's house and swapped out their radio in their driveway. At night.

    When GM bought EDS, Ross Perot ended up on the board. He'd do all sorts of silly things. Like when something went wrong with his car, he'd take it to a dealership. And report back to the board how that went. The first few times, they just told him to hand the keys to the valet at the executive garage and tell them what needs fixing. The plant I worked out of made radios. Other branches of the division that I worked for made engine computers and instrument clusters. If someone at the executive garage had a radio problem, one of my tasks was to go out to the assembly line, grab a radio, test it, then get it to the Kokomo airport for the GM jet to pick up. FedEx (tagline: when it positively has to be there the next day) wasn't fast enough. That fleet of jets would carry parts from plant to plant. And the executive garage was the best equipped and best staffed GM dealership on Earth.

    • bombcar  2 years ago

      You soon learn at a big company that almost any expense is justifiable to the boss if it prevents his boss from asking inconvenient questions.

      5 replies →

    • guidoism  2 years ago

      Delco! I now live in one of those small factory towns in Indiana. It’s fascinating to me how so many little towns in the Midwest existed just to make one small part for Detroit.

  • genewitch  2 years ago

    I've had the CEO of a municipal water company at my house looking at what his contractors did to my property frontage and potentially my well. Also, my other story in this thread is documented in posterity on a forum, you can see i didn't embellish any of it, and that involved a manager or supervisor having to drive quite a long time to my house at 10 PM with a technician to source a problem i had had for weeks or months.

    So, in essence, "it depends". Good stories, in the memetic sense, will have hooks to ensure that the moral or point of the story is remembered; in a great story, the memetic hooks are so great that you can repeat the story nearly verbatim to other people, after hearing it yourself.

  • ot1138  2 years ago

    Well, CEOs do look at these letters quite frequently. At least, I did when I was the CEO of a networking company.

    We were only selling equipment in the US at the time but some had found its way around the globe. This one particular Indian gentleman had been engaged for some time with support claiming that his unit wasn't working right and exhibiting all kinds of strange behavior.

    I had a habit of looking at the cases with the longest open history, which is how I found it. I continued to monitor though I didn't send anyone out to India or anything like that.

    Eventually it came out that the sleek looking aluminum unit had some kind of stocky packaging material stuck to it, so the customer had put it in the washer to clean it off.

  • yamazakiwi  2 years ago

    Without vast knowledge, many unreasonable things are seen as reasonable. How much of our history's truth is based on what was told to the gullible majority? Should we not talk about Mythology because a skeptic questions it's authenticity?

    Comedians make up stories all the time to entertain audiences. These stories don't require accuracy, they are more about delivering specific results; a laugh, a story to share, confirmation bias, etc.

    Many people lie, believing they're telling the truth. I think you will have a hard time truth policing people who don't and won't care, but focusing on truth and validity is probably a useful skill for you in many parts of your life.

    • fragmede  2 years ago

      If I tell you something I believe to be true, but actually isn't, I'm not lying, just wrong. Lying involves an intent to decieve, so if I don't know the truth, it's not a lie.

      2 replies →

  • Ikatza  2 years ago

    Your lack of faith is disturbing, specially when there are first hand accounts of [Apple/Microsoft/Insert Co] sending engineers to people's houses to diagnose unique problems. This could be a perfectly real story, a different thing would be that you choose not to believe it.

    • genewitch  2 years ago

      during the PPC 603 era of Macintosh Performa series, we had a bad motherboard, and apple sent an engineer to our house to replace it. This is around the time that the story of apple sending engineers to houses to remove motherboards, raise them 2 feet above a flat surface, and drop them was being passed around. Something about reseating chips that one of their pick and place machines was misaligned on or something.

      11 replies →

  • omoikane  2 years ago

    It's a fun story to read, whether it's fact or fiction. We are not too concerned about whether a large company would really send an engineer to investigate a seemly absurd claim, in the same way that we are not too concerned about whether one single shoe is able to uniquely identify Cinderella and no one else.

  • Paul-Craft  2 years ago

    It's not just any memetic structure though. Urban legends have a number of components to them that make people want to re-tell them. See, for instance, my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37596325

    One of the things I talk about is that these stories often ride the edge of plausibility. Even with this one, dispatching an engineer to someone's house over a "quack letter" seems like a thing that could happen or could have happened in the past. Having high level people involved is a thing that others have talked about, but I'd also like to point out that people have literally emailed jeff@amazon.com before about issues and gotten resolutions that way, so it's not completely off the mark.

    The real clue here that we're dealing with an urban legend and not an actual incident (though it may be based on one) is the lack of specifics. Urban legends are often not really pinned down to any specific time or place.

  • toss1  2 years ago

    >>all these stories are apocryphal

    Do not mistake cynicism for intelligence. It is actually negatively correlated [0, + other studies]

    Just listing a basket of "I doubt..." and "No one does..." does not make it all false.

    Of course Just So stories exist, but that does not mean that all cool stories are fabricated Just So stories. In this case, it is the cynicism that merits a [Citation Needed] tag.

    [0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/trust-games/202111/t...