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I know it's unrelated because this has an actual explanation, but I had an ex that stopped watches simply by wearing them for a while.

The model didn't matter, give them a few weeks, and they would stop. Put them aside for a while, they started back.

Never could figure out why, no particular behavior emerged, she changed jobs and houses and I couldn't see a pattern.

Fun that life is still full of weird stuff like this.



Reminds me of the Pauli effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_effect


> the supposed tendency of technical equipment to encounter critical failure in the presence of certain people

Is there an inverse of this?

Often times, people ask me to help them do something on the computer or with other computer related or electronic things. I walk over, touch the equipment without actually doing anything and their problem is instantly solved. Could be a printer that won’t print, even!

I don’t see any links in the See Also section about any “effect” like this.


That would be "Demonstration Effect" or "IT Support Effect". Happens every other support call.

I bet this is why half the older companies still have a tech person on staff. :-)


Fascinating. Did she work in medical / hard science? I could imagine some exposure to radiation / magnetization could do this.


Nope. Hotel, then airplanes.


Maybe using their watch hand to magnetize the hotel key cards?


I thought about it but their colleagues would have had the same problem, yet didn't. Plus becomming flight attendant removed that activity.

Not to mention it happened during the hollidays too.

It's probably more life style related, but I was there during said life style and couldn't figure it out.


Maybe some sort of magnet phone mount.




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