Reminds me of that bug where people couldn't print on tuesdays....
Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
261–270 of 517 posts
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it was surrounded by a crowd of engineers, surely someone would have tested the battery?
A friend who is an automotive engineer shared once that most colleages were not so great with cars. Engineering new cars is one thing; fixing them is another. It's like asking a programmer to do system administration - two different jobs.
It's not much different than computers.
Lots of programmers that would struggle to diagnose basic stuff when their laptop when it goes wrong.
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#263We’re doing straight up urban legends now? Flagged.
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
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 p…
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.
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have a countertop ice maker that gets jammed up and overloaded with ice on sunny days for a similar reason. There's an infrared beam and sensor. When the ice tray is full, it is supposed to block the beam, and then the machine stops making ice. On a sunny day, there's enough bright light in our kitchen to fool the sensor so it keeps making ice. We have a random magazine that we put on top of it to make it work cor…
I have a garage door that will not close on sunny days. Same sort of problem. The obstruction sensor at the bottom of the door is confused by the strong sunlight and the door stops closing part way and re-opens. I've tried a toilet-paper tube around the sensor but that isn't always successful. I really wish there was a laser sensor to replace it with.
Similar problem toilet-paper hack worked.
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#266This reminds me of a GM minivan that my youngest brother-in-law drove, back in the '80's. He'd gotten it from his father, who was a career GM automotive engineer - and complained that, occasionally & randomly, it would not start. It seemed like the minivan's whole electrical system was dead... Brother-in-law was known to be "not so good" with cars - so his automotive engineer father didn't take the complaints serious…
Plenty of cars that intermittently won't turn on in this thread, but I once had a car that intermittently wouldn't turn off... or at least the headlights wouldn't. I assume a relay somewhere was overheating and that was making it stay closed, but I never debugged it, and nor could my cousin who was an auto mechanic. We never tried too hard, though: I would just take the fuse out if it happened and put it back the nex…
True story: I had that happen to an airplane. I was a student on a long solo flight and on the last two legs of that flight, the engine wouldn't shut off using the usual method of pulling the throttle back to idle and turning off the magneto.
It's been long enough that I don't remember what I did to get it shut off (maybe I toggled a circuit breaker?), but when I got back to base, I made a note in the airplane log about the problem and also left a note for my instructor, who was out that day.
When I came in for my next lesson, instructor mentioned that the next person to use the airplane, also a student on a solo cross-country, got stranded 100 miles away because when the engine wouldn't shut off, he panicked and pulled the throttle hard enough to rip the cable through the firewall. Airplane had to be put on a flatbed to get it back home.
Guess he didn't see my note!
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#267This story is a playful example of confounding:
> In causal inference, a confounder (also confounding variable, confounding factor, extraneous determinant or lurking variable) is a variable that influences both the dependent variable and independent variable, causing a spurious association. Confounding is a causal concept, and as such, cannot be described in terms of correlations or associations. The existence of confounders is an important quantitative explanation why correlation does not imply causation. Some notations are explicitly designed to identify the existence, possible existence, or non-existence of confounders in causal relationships between elements of a system. / Confounds are threats to internal validity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding
Here is a sketch of a statistical model that shows a confounder (a variable affecting both the dependent and independent variables)
S = f(H, I, T)
`S`: car starting or not (dependent variable)
`H`: how hot is the car engine (independent variable)
`I`: ice cream type chosen (independent variable)
`T`: time taken to buy the ice cream (a confounder)
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#268We had a similar problem at work in the late 90s. A member of staff reported that their mouse would stop working between certain hours of the day. It had apparently been okay in the morning, stopped working over lunchtime then started again later. On some days it would work perfectly all day long, but on others it would stop working between those hours. The biggest clue was it would always work perfectly on overcast…
I love these kinds of problems. There's an old story about a bug where some people couldn't send an email further than 500 miles. Huh?
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
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 priori…
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.
Re: Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's more like a common experience. My wife and I both work, so we have cleaners come in every two weeks for a deep clean. We've used several different companies, and apparently it's standard practice to unplug things when a power outlet is needed. They don't unplug computers that have monitors, and they don't unplug things with visible clocks that would need to be reset, so they do take some care not to inco…
It is a common story and sometimes those get put in the collective blender and we get apocryphal stories out of it. Here's two stories of my own: Back in the mid 90s, I built out a system that gave every school in a district their own webpage that was carved out of some government funding for providing internet access. There was no budget for hardware though, so it ended up running on a repurposed workstation in some…
Goes again to show the usual thing that gets you caught is repetition.
Had he struck once or twice and then left the rest alone nobody may ever have figured it out.