
Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000) - kornish
http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/smann/IceCream/humor.html
======
egocodedinsol
Sent this to my father, a control systems engineer. He responded with his own
story:

"This is a true story which I saw with my own eyes. In Arkansas... It was in
the afternoon, at a boiler plant. Boilers have an induced draft fan that pulls
combustion products from the combustion chamber. A big, big fan with an
electric operated throttling damper.

The damper began behaving erratically and the operator jumped up, grabbed a
firehose and started hosing down the actuator housing. I asked him what was
going on. He said that the actuator had overheated and he was cooling it down
and went on about it being a bad design.

Anyway, the actuator began working properly. He said this happens when the sun
shines on the unit etc. And it was a bad design etc., Etc.etc

Then it happened again at 11:00 PM. Same story. I asked him about the fact it
was cooler and the sun wasn't shining on it. Don't recall his answer but he
explained it all away, got the fire hose out and fixed it and I got the bad
design lecture again.

Turned out to be a loose wire. The shaking from the fire hose always fixed the
problem temporarily and reinforced his belief.

He was truly disappointed."

~~~
dllu
Shaking things often fixes problems. This reminds me of the following story:

> [O]ne of the earliest [applications] of dither came in World War II.
> Airplane bombers used mechanical computers to perform navigation and bomb
> trajectory calculations. Curiously, these computers (boxes filled with
> hundreds of gears and cogs) performed more accurately when flying on board
> the aircraft, and less well on ground. Engineers realized that the vibration
> from the aircraft reduced the error from sticky moving parts. Instead of
> moving in short jerks, they moved more continuously. Small vibrating motors
> were built into the computers, and their vibration was called dither from
> the Middle English verb "didderen," meaning "to tremble." Today, when you
> tap a mechanical meter to increase its accuracy, you are applying dither,
> and modern dictionaries define dither as a highly nervous, confused, or
> agitated state. In minute quantities, dither successfully makes a
> digitization system a little more analog in the good sense of the word.

— Ken Pohlmann, Principles of Digital Audio

~~~
mikeash
A similar phenomenon occurs with aircraft altimeters. They move smoothly in
small propellor planes but tend to stick and then jump maybe 50ft at a time in
gliders. Tapping the altimeter is standard procedure if you want to see small
movements.

~~~
cperciva
And also with humans! Vibrating insoles can make the elderly less prone to
falls, because adding noise can bring the signal of differential pressures on
parts of the foot high enough for them to feel that they're off-balance before
they're unable to recover.

~~~
merqurio
It might even help on maintaining your bones healthy ! [1]

[1]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27145947](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27145947)

------
DonHopkins
I posted this before, but it's worth repeating now:

I heard a story about a terminal in a public terminal room that a user was
able to consistently log in to if they were sitting down in a chair in front
if the terminal, but never if they were standing up.

They thought it might be static electricity, or some mechanical problem, or
"problem exists between keyboard and chair", but finally they noticed
something else was amiss...

It turns out some joker had re-arranged the 1234567890 keys to be 0123456789,
so when the user was standing up, they looked down at the keyboard and typed
their password (which contained a digit, of course) by looking at the keys.
But when they were sitting down, they touch typed without looking at the keys,
and got their password correct!

~~~
Tharre
Why does a touch typist suddenly look at the keyboard when he's standing up?
Or are the people standing the same that don't know how to properly use a
keyboard?

~~~
sp332
It's an awkward position for your wrists to be in. You can't touch the home
row with most of your fingers and hit the digits comfortably at the same time.
That means moving your hands a lot, which means touch typing is likely to go
badly.

~~~
grzm
This awkward position has to do with the position of the keyboard relative to
the shoulders (thus how the arms are positioned so the fingers reach the
keys). There's nothing inherent in standing itself: just whether the desk set
up positions the keyboard correctly. This is true whether standing or not.
Standing versus sitting is mostly a difference from the waist down, is it not?

Edit to add: It appears my parent and I had different assumptions regarding
the setup, which we cleared up below.

~~~
tempestn
The thing inherent in standing is that you're higher up and the desk isn't.
(Presumably this wasn't a height-adjustable desk.) So your arms are more
extended, not in the standard orientation for touch typing.

~~~
grzm
Gotcha. I _was_ assuming the desk is set up appropriately whether seated or
standing. I think we're in agreement that improper environments are improper.
:)

~~~
megablast
What an odd assumption to make.

~~~
mirimir
Yes, height-adjustable desks are a relatively recent thing.

~~~
jsjohnst
The best height adjustable desk I've ever had was back in 1999. It even had
the extra burden of raising a 22" CRT I had at the time.

Admittedly I've not looked hard, but never saw a desk for sale as good as the
ones Southwestern Bell had for everyone back then.

~~~
mirimir
Wow. I had no clue. Do you remember the manufacturer?

~~~
jsjohnst
Wish I did. Been looking for one similar since and never found one (as said
before, not looked hard, but have definitely tried off and on).

------
ggreer
I hate to be that person, but I doubt the story is true. The variance in time
spent waiting in the checkout line is far greater than the time it takes to
walk to the front vs back of the store.

What do you know? I google "snopes car allergic to ice cream" and find that
it's an urban legend:
[http://www.snopes.com/autos/techno/icecream.asp](http://www.snopes.com/autos/techno/icecream.asp)

~~~
Itsdijital
It's not that far fetched though.

I had a an old motorcycle years ago that was the same way as this guy's car.
If I stopped to grab a snack, my bike would not start again. If I stopped for
lunch, then it would fire back up no problem. Sure enough the problem was
vapor lock. However the time needed for the bike to cool enough was about
15-20 minutes, not the couple minutes mentioned in this story.

~~~
StavrosK
It's definitely a thing that can happen, just not in the time frames mentioned
here. 5 minutes for a snack vs 30 minutes for dinner sounds plausible, 3
minutes for vanilla vs 4 minutes for chocolate does not.

------
ramanan
Reminds me of one of my all-time favorites -

The 500 mile email

[https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html](https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html)

~~~
joshvm
Don't forget the magic switch:

[http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/magic-
story.html](http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/magic-story.html)

(Also mildly upset that units on OS X only has 586 units and 56 prefixes,
fortunately brew install gnu-units to the rescue!)

------
rzimmerman
Another (real) story of my own:

We had a piece of software that would present a dialog for the user to select
a file, then parse and send the contents to an embedded device. This software
was an internal tool and not very reliable, so it would crash if you selected
a file with invalid contents.

Two engineers, Dan and Brian, came to me with a tricky problem. Every time Dan
would open a specific file everything would work fine. Every time Brian
selected the same file the program would crash. I was obviously skeptical and
went to watch. We tried it 10-20 times and sure enough, it always failed for
Brian and worked for Dan. I watched them perform the exact same steps.

Eventually I gave it a try myself and realized what was going on. Dan would
click "open", select the file, then click OK. Brian would click "open" then
double click the file.

~~~
JSoet
I had a similar story from just a few weeks ago. One of my colleagues was
having trouble logging into his test instance, but he was the only one having
this problem. Tried on my machine and it worked fine, made sure we were both
using the exact same version of the code, etc. and he continued to have the
problem while I didn't... Eventually we realized that he only had this problem
on firefox and not chrome, and then we finally realized that the problem was
in Firefox he had his credentials saved and was hitting the 'Login' button,
whereas on Chrome he was typing them in and hitting enter, which is apparently
what I and the rest of my colleagues also do, but luckily he found that bug
with a slight difference in the logic between the two paths before it went to
production.

------
phoboslab
This is the kind of bug report that will keep you busy (and occasionally drive
you crazy) as an Open Source maintainer. The bug is real, but the reporter
completely fails to (or is too "lazy" to) isolate the problem or build a
simple test case without a lot of hand holding.

I recently filed a bug with Chromium[1]. It took me about 3 hours to isolate
the problem and build a simple test case when I could have just reported "My
HTML5 game fails to load when I refresh the page" \- making it extremely time
consuming for the Chrome maintainers (much more so than it was for me) to find
the culprit.

Please isolate the problem when reporting bugs!

[1]
[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=677633](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=677633)

------
adhksafds
Here's one of my favorites from my desktop support days. A frequent flying
calls in one day to report that her keyboard is broken. Diagnostic questions
indicate that it keeps entering spaces all on its own.

I bring a replacement but first sit town and test-drive it without any issue,
to her surprise. Next, I watch her type. Now, this user happens to be a rather
large woman, working at a somewhat cramped desk. After typing for a bit, she
exclaims, "See, it's doing it again!" Sure enough, spaces are appearing in her
word processor, and her thumbs are not pushing the spacebar. Her breasts,
however, are. I delicately explained to her that she is "leaning" on the
keyboard. By rearranging her desk and seat, the problem was happily solved.

Probably the most apt PEBKAC I've witnessed.

------
headcanon
> A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off
> and on.

> Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a
> machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going
> wrong."

> Knight turned the machine off and on.

> The machine worked.

[http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html#id3141171](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html#id3141171)

------
BeniBoy
My father encountered one of these voodoo issues once. He works in satellite
images processing. Basically uses Spot data to analyse ground vegetation
coverage.

One day while processing a batch, he noticed one parcel was giving the most
awkward results. Totally different that anything he ever saw. This bug
troubled him for almost a week, he couldn't figure out wether the satellite
malfunctioned or if something was amiss in his calculation. Then it clicked,
and a quick internet search confirmed his intuition. The satellite took the
picture right in the middle of a solar eclipse!

------
hollander
Many years ago we had a webserver that would stop working every other Friday
around noon. I couldn't figure out what the problem was. I was the de-facto
systems administrator, just because the previous left, so I was not really
into this stuff. It was not a big deal, this was a non-essential development
server, so I didn't pay much attention to it. I figured out the server
rebooted, and the webserver didn't start automatically after a reboot. This
was a configuration problem, and if it hadn't been for this, I maybe never
would have known about the problem.

About half a year later we were working in the server room, replacing a server
when a colleague unplugged the old UPS in there. Unplugging the UPS for a
minute shouldn't be a problem. The battery would take over and nothing would
go down.

But well, the two servers attached to it immediately went down. It took me a
minute, and then it dawned to me that this was the problem. The UPS did a test
every other Friday, shut the power off as a test, which caused the two
attached servers to restart, after which the webserver didn't start...

We removed the UPS as we didn't need it in the first place, problem solved.

------
cperciva
Not quite as obscure, but the solution to "I can list my tarsnap archives but
I can't extract them" is "fix your broken path MTU discovery" \-- listing
archives accidentally avoids MTU problems because it doesn't send enough data
at once to fill a MTU-sized segment.

~~~
diamondo25
I think thats the same reason why you can still do a SSH connection to a
server with a wrong MTU setting. This helped me fixing a Synology NAS (couldnt
access the web interface anymore)

~~~
mnadkvlb
SSH over wrong size MTU killed a lot of my time one day too. It took me so
long to figure out what was wrong, when a few of the connections would be
working fine while others would just show me a dead screen after a while. In
the end i decreased the MTU on my machine and it stopped happening mostly, but
would still do it every now and then.

------
adhksafds
I have this problem. When I drive home after a long commute, I have really,
really loud wheel noise (loud like impossible to ignore, turning your head on
the street kind of noise). This only happens when I am driving 40 minutes or
more, and only on the last couple miles to my house (which happens to be
several miles of downhill driving with a fairly steep grade towards the end).
The noise continues to persist, even at very low speeds once I get into town.
If I let the car sit for just five minutes or so, the noise goes away.

This doesn't happen every time I drive home. It might depend on environmental
conditions. It won't ever happen if I just go for a quick drive up and down
the hill. The dealership has not been able to find anything wrong with it or
come up with any explanation. This has been happening for over two years, it's
a 2013 Honda hybrid, bought new. I've speculated if it could some brake-
related issue that only manifests when braking regeneration is suppressed when
the battery is full. Has me at my wit's end. When I get home from work the
dealership is closed, and even if I could make it into the dealership with the
thing clanking away, by the time I could get in and talk to someone the noise
would go away unless I had them on the phone and ready to hop into the car at
a moment's notice. So much for the warranty.

~~~
madaxe_again
Without hearing it I can't say for sure, but do you brake intermittently or
continuously while going downhill?

If the latter, it'll likely be a caliper & disk getting hot and expanding, and
rubbing, which can make an almighty racket - and then when they cool again
they contract, meaning that a cold inspection would reveal little.

Alternately it's a wheel bearing on its way out, but that's unlikely on a new
vehicle.

Does it get any better or worse when you apply steering, or not change at all?

~~~
emmelaich
Yeah check noise response to steering. I suspect CV joint problems. Very
commmon, but often not disabling.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant-
velocity_joint](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant-velocity_joint)

------
lubujackson
Back when I was a severely cheap and short-sighted college student I drove a
beater Chevy Corsica that had a recurring problem: it would stall if I stopped
the car.

Now I could start the car fine, usually. But after driving for a few minutes,
if I came to a stop the car would stutter, lurch and stall. I would then
restart the car with a bit more effort and continue to the next stop, where
the problem got worse and it would take longer and longer to get the car
restarted. But eventually the car WOULD restart and I would continue on.

It was the perfect confluence of conditions to promote all kinds of stupid
behavior. I always said, "I'm not driving again until I get this fixed" and
two days later saying, "wellll, I can make it to the supermarket before it
stalls!"

This went on for MONTHS, with the overall problem getting steadily worse. I
could feel the car fighting to stay running as I slowed down. I became a
master of giving myself a huge lead up to red lights and slowwwwly lurching up
to them, desperately hoping the light would turn. One time I took a rolling
right turn at a red, did a u-turn, took another right and kept going. One time
I stalled at a tollbooth for 10 minutes. Like I said, I was an idiot.

I was certain this was going to be some tragic $1000 repair that I could ill-
afford. When I finally brought the car in, the mechanic could find nothing
wrong - except my air filter was exceptionally dirty. The car had simply been
choked to death and needed more and more WIND to provide oxygen for
combustion.

~~~
thestepafter
My first car was a Chevy Corsica and I had a very similar problem, finally
donated the car and got a different one. I wonder if my air filter was bad as
well...

------
scott_karana
List of software folklore, including this, the 500 mile email, and the rest:

[http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/](http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/)

------
gsylvie
Reminds me of Ubuntu Bug 255161: Openoffice can't print on Tuesdays
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171956](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171956))

------
bungie4
I think this is the first time ever I can provide at least some amount of
verification to a story published on the Internet.

A family friend was a service advisor for a GM dealership in the 60's and
early 70's. He told this same story to me in the late 70's.

Whether its true, or, was used to teach service advisors not to dismiss 'crazy
claims I don't know. But it's been around longer than year 2000 cited in the
story.

Edit: So its an urban legend. At least this one predates the Internet

~~~
JdeBP
Snopes, already mentioned on this page, notes that it is an urban legend, and
that it has reversed sense over 30 years, with vanilla/pistachio originally
being the flavour(s) where the car _would_ start.

------
ars
This is why I take every bug report seriously, no matter how implausible.

I might not always be able to figure it out, but I at least try.

------
azurezyq
We just met with a similar problem. Guy A met a with a problem that VM cannot
be initialized repeatedly but guy B tried hard but still cannot reproduce.
Turns out that A's user name is just a bit longer and hit systemd's 2K line
limit.

~~~
digi_owl
Dear deity...

------
firefoxd
Ok this is a true story, and i still cannot explain it. But i will tell you
anyhow.

We had a small clock that we kept in the closet. When you got up in the
morning to get your clothes you could also see the time of day. In a quiet
night, you could hear it ticking away.

One night it stopped ticking.

In the morning, we opened the closet to see if the battery had died. We gave
it a good 3 seconds to make sure the needle wouldn't move, ... It did. It
started ticking away.

The night that followed we stayed quiet and listened. It was quiet. So battery
first thing in the morning. Morning came, we opened the closet door. 3 seconds
later, it ticked. That was odd.

In the middle of the day we came to the closet, opened the door, the needle
was still. Some seconds passed, the little clock started ticking.

Now it became knowledge in the whole family. We were kids so we would take it
for a game. From time to time we would just stop talking and listen and hear
nothing, we open the closet the clock is still, then it starts suddenly. We
called it a ghost.

Years went by, new batteries were put in place, the clock still behaved the
same. Everytime you started looking at it, it would start ticking.

It became a boring thing. No one cared about the little clock any more. I
would open the closet, see it still, take my stuff and close it and it
wouldn't even tick. But then i open it back up and it starts ticking two
seconds later. Meh.

Then i had an idea. It was an idea so crazy that i was scared to try. I
consulted with my brothers their eyes grew wide... So we did it... We removed
the battery from the clock and closed the door.

Thr next morning was quiet. We were getting ready to go to school. All three
of us stood in front of the closet door. Ready to see what was going to
happen. My older brother opened the door. And the clock was there, quiet.

One second passed. I was afraid of what was going to happen. Two seconds
passed. Lord please... Three ... Tick.

~~~
ldjb
Perhaps the clock runs on solar power when it can't run on battery power?
There might be an issue with the connections or wiring that prevents battery
power from working, which would explain why replacing the battery didn't help.

I'm sure that's not the only possible explanation.

------
baldeagle
I like how the traditional 'five whys' approach wouldn't work here... the
answer was in a 'how'.

~~~
jedimastert
> 'five whys' approach

Can you explain this a bit more?

~~~
resoluteteeth
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys)

------
savvyraccoon
Interesting story, but who will put most popular item at the front of the
store? It will be in the back of the store so customers will pass the other
items in store and buy something compulsively

~~~
lubujackson
Haha, this has already been debunked mostly due to the time difference being
negligible, but I like your "rational capitalist" approach.

------
suprgeek
Another Parable:

I heard this in a presentation that was emphasizing the need to actually speak
to the Ops folks before deploying the solutions that dev dreamed up:

A toothpaste factory had a problem: Due to the way the production line was set
up, sometimes empty boxes were shipped without the tube inside. People with
experience in designing production lines will tell you how difficult it is to
have everything happen with timings so precise that every single unit coming
off of it is perfect 100% of the time. Small variations in the environment
(which cannot be controlled in a cost-effective fashion) mean quality
assurance checks must be smartly distributed across the production line so
that customers all the way down to the supermarket won’t get frustrated and
purchase another product instead.

Understanding how important that was, the CEO of the toothpaste factory
gathered the top people in the company together. Since their own engineering
department was already stretched too thin, they decided to hire an external
engineering company to solve their empty boxes problem.

The project followed the usual process: budget and project sponsor allocated,
RFP (request for proposal), third-parties selected, and six months (and $8
million) later a fantastic solution was delivered — on time, on budget, high
quality and everyone in the project had a great time. The problem was solved
by using high-tech precision scales that would sound a bell and flash lights
whenever a toothpaste box would weigh less than it should. The line would
stop, and someone had to walk over and yank the defective box off the line,
then press another button to re-start the line.

A short time later, the CEO decided to have a look at the ROI (return on
investment) of the project: amazing results! No empty boxes ever shipped out
of the factory after the scales were put in place. There were very few
customer complaints, and they were gaining market share. “That was some money
well spent!” he said, before looking closely at the other statistics in the
report.

The number of defects picked up by the scales was 0 after three weeks of
production use. How could that be? It should have been picking up at least a
dozen a day, so maybe there was something wrong with the report. He filed a
bug against it, and after some investigation, the engineers indicated the
statistics were indeed correct. The scales were NOT picking up any defects,
because all boxes that got to that point in the conveyor belt were good.

Perplexed, the CEO traveled down to the factory and walked up to the part of
the line where the precision scales were installed. A few feet before the
scale, a $20 desk fan was blowing any empty boxes off the belt and into a bin.
Puzzled, the CEO turned to one of the workers who stated, “Oh, that…One of the
guys put it there ’cause he was tired of walking over every time the bell
rang!”

[http://cs.txstate.edu/~br02/cs1428/ShortStoryForEngineers.ht...](http://cs.txstate.edu/~br02/cs1428/ShortStoryForEngineers.htm)

~~~
ldjb
Slight nitpick, but if someone got tired walking over every time the bell
rang, then surely the bell must have rung several times, in which case the
scales must have picked up several defects, not zero.

You do also need to factor in the electricity costs for the desk fan, although
it probably still is a lot more economical than the $8 million solution.

~~~
dsr_
I read it as "after three weeks in production, they noticed that the daily
defect rate was now 0 instead of the dozen or so that they expected".

Natural languages are ambiguous...

------
samirillian
I thought the moral of the story would be "correlation does not prove
causation."

------
dundercoder
How many times I've skipped checking something because... There's no way it
could be that!

Only to spend 3+ hours troubleshooting other things, discovering in fact, it
was the simple dumb thing.

~~~
saghm
> How many times I've skipped checking something because... There's no way it
> could be that!

I TA'd a course in college that (among other things) was the first
introduction that CS students at my school had to C programming. Since most
students had no prior experience with anything besides Java (and a little
OCaml, because one of the intro courses was half Java and half OCaml), they
often would be at a complete loss of how to debug errors with pointers, string
handling, etc. Whenever I tried to help students debug something in office
hours, they would try to steer me away from looking in certain parts of their
code because they "knew that was correct", and quite often the error would be
in one of those parts of the code. The lesson I tried to teach them was that
if you thought you wrote all your code correctly but it still doesn't work
correctly, then you must have been wrong about something, so you have to be
ready to challenge your assumptions about what's working and what isn't.

~~~
ldjb
Occasionally, the fault isn't even really in the code! I remember some years
ago spending a very long time debugging some code for my school coursework
with my teacher. The code looked perfectly fine, but it didn't work. The usual
process of commenting parts out didn't work. We finally realised the code
editor was inserting a byte order mark into the file which caused the problem.

------
jsight
This is a great story. I have run into plenty of obscure problems like this in
software development with "not reproducible bugs".

------
kirpekar
Guy should have called Click and Clack

~~~
ethbro
For those too young or unlucky to pick up the reference, parent is referring
to Car Talk, a radio show featuring Tom and Ray Magliozzi and their live
solutions to automotive problems (also, existential life questions).

After running for decades, it was finally retired in 2012. The archives
remain, in my opinion, some of the finest exercises in logical problem
solving.

[http://www​.cartalk.com/](http://www​.cartalk.com/)

~~~
jccalhoun
For better or worse the show is still airing "best of" episodes. I hear the
end of it every Saturday morning when I switch to my local NPR station to hear
the show that comes on after it.

------
thestateofmay
rofl that doesn't sound very logical. He didn't have ANY other instance of him
starting the car fast enough that it triggered the vapor lock?

fun story though.

------
IgorPartola
I once helped a coworker fix her not working keyboard in a fun way. Her
computer was working fine, and her keyboard worked with any other computer,
but not with her own. She tried all the usual things except one: I told her to
unplug the computer and actually wait 30 seconds, not just power cycle it.

My theory is that the USB hub had a bad capacitor or some such which needed to
discharge fully before communication on that port could happen. Funny thing is
that she worked in tech support and would give this advice to others all the
time.

~~~
mikeash
Usually that sort of request is made in tech support not because the action is
more useful, but because users are clueless or will outright lie about power
cycling. Asking something unusual like this gives you better odds that they
will actually do it, rather than, say, power cycling their _monitor_ , or
pretending to power cycle because they're terminally lazy.

~~~
IgorPartola
Of course. But apparently once in N times it does something.

~~~
mikeash
Right. I didn't mean to imply it would always be useless, just explain why
someone who works tech support might not follow their own troubleshooting
steps to the letter in this case.

------
dawnoooo
[http://www.snopes.com/autos/techno/icecream.asp](http://www.snopes.com/autos/techno/icecream.asp)

------
rocketraman
There was a better story about a printer / print server I remember reading
somewhere -- someone here will remember and link it I'm sure. This story is so
obviously contrived -- what would happen to the gentleman after his car would
not start? By the time he called Triple-A or whomever, the car would start
again, so the problem of time would be obvious even to a non-engineer.

------
donohoe
Sounds fake. Engineer would have tested it multiple times on same day, not
wait stay 3+ days just to test once per day.

------
dghughes
Believe it or not I had a problem a bit similar only it was a problem with my
transmission. I called it the ATM/Convenience Store problem.

If I made a quick stop then got back in my vehicle the automatic transmission
wouldn't shift from 1st gear. I had to do all kinds of shifting stopping
voodoo to get it to work.

I had brought it to the dealership several times but their mechanic said
nothing was wrong or he couldn't find anything wrong. I didn't tell them it
was the ATM a using it I said it was quick stop and go situations.

It still does it ocasionally but it seems age and wear are helping diminish
the occurrences.

------
amoshag
They eat ice cream every day??

~~~
gfosco
Even crazier, they don't buy more than one nights worth.. so they make a trip
to the supermarket just for ice cream every night. (It's just a myth)

~~~
tonyedgecombe
If you go back to the fifties or sixties it's quite possible a family might
have a car but not a freezer.

------
ww520
This speaks volume on how human can rationalize any phenomenon. When faced
with a unexplained event, we all try to rationalize cause behind it even if
there's not the real cause.

------
ktopaz
some more "impossible bug" stories:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2p6qy5/4_impossible_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2p6qy5/4_impossible_bugs_any_other_stories_like_these/)

------
hyperbole
And this is why I miss car talk...

------
digler999
The top comment here should be the one about "correlation doesn't prove
causation". Secondly, this makes me think of Cargo Cult[1] programming
practices. Your practices might be right, but it's much more valuable to know
_why_ they're right. [ or often, unnecessary, as CC practices usually are ].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science)

------
NotThe1Pct
I read this story 15 years ago and always cite it.

Pleased to see it again

