Tag Archive: computer


The Cable Coincidence

(Submitted by reader Andy Harding)

We had just moved into a new house and couldn’t find the cable to connect my printer to my computer. I gave up looking and decided to go into town and buy a new one.

As I left the house I found the cable I needed laying in the road. The weekly garbage truck had passed a few minutes earlier.

No, it wasn’t the cable I had lost; it was shorter and a different color. I later found the missing cable in a different box.

When I tell people about this I get some funny looks, I don’t think anyone believes me.


Below are the extended notes provided by cognitive psychologist and statistician Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 221.  Take a look and leave your comments below. Also, please be sure to listen to the podcast for our own sarcastic and hilarious commentary. Also, visit Barbara’s blog.

This is a very impressive story, but I have little analysis to offer.

It’s highly likely that the cable is very common, since most printer cables are pretty standard, but it’s not very often that people just throw out cables. To top that off, how often do those cables fall out of trash bins (or a car, or wherever it came from) to be found lying on the ground? And right when he needed it?

I’d say this one is just one of those extremely unlikely events that we must expect a few of in our lives.

The Ring Comes Home

I’m shockingly realizing right now that an entire decade ago the film The Ring came out in theaters. For anyone who was around at the time and had movie-going friends, this was a phenomenon. It was impossible to avoid hyperbole about what a brilliant, shocking, terrifying horror film it was, and it simply, truly, positively could NOT be missed. I’m not a horror fan, but my then-wife was and I did my job and took her to the theater to see it.

Personally, I wasn’t impressed. I felt like most of the “terror” was cheap startles of either something jumping out or a quick cut to something gruesome. Maybe I missed something, or maybe I really did expect more from what had been sold as one of the greatest horror films ever, but it left me cold.

Now I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by saying the main concept in the film is that a person views this video that contains a series of weird, creepy, and oddly sickening images. After the video is done, the phone rings. When the person answers the phone they hear a girl’s voice tell them that they have seven days left to live. If they don’t get someone else to watch the video before then (transferring the curse to them), they’re dead. Predictably (to me, anyway), the film ends with that very video being shown full-screen to the theater audience, in theory to terrify them by transferring the curse to them. I’m sure that was exceptionally scary for anyone who enjoyed the film better. It did nothing for me. At least not at the theater…

When we arrived home afterwards I walked into the house to hear the sound of a ringing phone. Except the house phone wasn’t ringing. The ringing was coming from my computer in the bedroom. It was the ring it makes when the main line rings so I can hit a pop-up to allow it to receive a fax, except again, the main line wasn’t ringing. I checked the screen and there were no programs running in the taskbar that could have triggered it and the fax pop-up wasn’t visible. The phone continued to ring. I checked the notification area and found no fax application or anything else that appeared related to the sound. The computer kept ringing. I opened up the task manager and started closing process after process, working my way down to core applications. THE COMPUTER KEPT RINGING. Finally I initiated a system restart at which point the ringing stopped during shutdown and didn’t return after I started the system back up.

So while the film itself didn’t do much for me directly, one of the strangest bugs I’d ever experienced on my computer happened to occur perfectly timed against the plot of the film, and managed to do exactly what the movie failed to do: scare the crap out of me. And to this day I have no idea what happened.