This reminds me of a recent issue I had. I had just gotten a new laptop from IT. While picking it up from them, I had generated myself a password, put it in my password manager on my phone, and then entered it twice to set it on the laptop. Everything worked great. But when I got back to my desk, the password didn't work! I tried a bunch of times, watched myself hit each key to eliminate typos, etc.
I went back to IT and they asked me to demonstrate. But this time it worked! I walked back to my desk, thoroughly embarrassed. But a couple hours later I had to log in again and once again could not.
After thinking about it for awhile, I realized that I was typing at IT while standing over a sitting-height desk. Sure enough, typing in that position fixed my issue. I carefully watched what I was doing this time - something about the exact layout of the keyboard and the weird angle I was typing at ensured that I was making a particular typo I typed in that position - just a single letter switched to another, every time. Sure enough, making that one substitution to my intended password got me in.
If it's a key that you may not often type and one that is often transposed between regions, the fact that the entered char is not shown can lead to frustration.
e.g. " and @ are in different positions in UK vs. US keyboards. So user thinks they are typing @, but " goes into the box.
(Side note: those are not a and o with diacretics, they are entirely separate letters in the alphabets of the Nordic countries, with entirely different sounds.)
Side note: helping my French housemate with his uni assignments was an experience, none of the symbols were where I expected them to be
I've used US keyboard layout since I started programming (my first mentor essentially forced me to switch to it, he was right about it being easier), but throughout the years been using Swedish, Norwegian, British, Spanish and French physical keyboards, never cleanly mapped to the actual layout I've used on the OS, and never been an issue.
The last part though, is a real one, trying to pair program with Spanish programmers always have at least one moment of holding Shift and sliding the finger across all numbers to see where that specific symbol actually is.
Almost felt like a bug in error correction loop in my brain, or maybe more like an unconsidered edge case.
I also tend to memorize long (8+ digit) PINs based on the physical layout of the keys, so if I need to enter a PIN set up on a phone-style keypad on a normal keyboard or numeric keypad, or vice versa, I need to visualize entering the PIN on the original input device to remember it.
- Putting the car in reverse sets off the neighbor's home security system. https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/7k12fs/neighbors_hous...
Snopes covered this one and they cite to an urban legends book from 1989: "Curses, Broiled Again" by Jan Harold Brunvand. Brunvand prints the "vanilla takes longer" version and reports also having a "pistachio takes longer" version printed in a magazine in 1978, which itself referred to another magazine as its source. In the book's version it's a Texas car dealer who's looking into the problem. The same author's later book from 1999 covers the story again and includes versions dating back further, plus a 1992 version which is this one where it's Pontiac and the problem is the vanilla being in a separate case at the front of the store.
In the Pontiac version you can go and pick at various implausible details stacked up together, that Pontiac's president cares enough to send an engineer out, that the engineer is there when the car won't start on the first night but still just comes back many more times rather than looking at the car or presumably noticing that it starts a couple minutes later, that this guy is buying a new container of ice cream every night and never stocking up, that he never takes any other trip where it's a short stop... You can go on each of those and say they do happen: like presidents and CEOs do sometimes go digging deep on random problems customers put in front of them. But if you look at the whole thing I think you need to recognize it as a piece of storytelling, not fact.
Maybe there's some kernel of a true story in there, but if so it's probably a pretty small kernel. Anyway it doesn't matter much: it's just a fun story that teaches a little lesson so people like to share it around.
Office chairs are turning monitors on and off.
This is actually officially documented on the DisplayLink website as well: https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/73861...
https://old.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/cp48t...
And my personal favorite, "more magic": https://web.archive.org/web/20260103114654/http://www.catb.o...
[0] https://www.jakepoz.com/debugging-behind-the-iron-curtain/
- Car allergic to vanilla ice cream: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wkw/humour/carproblems.txt
- Can't log in when standing up: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52p...
- OpenOffice won't print on Tuesdays: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...