The Magic Touch

There's a famous Temkoian family myth about how I'm death on electronics. My dad got a new TV once that had this little control panel which recessed into the front face. In order to access it, you pushed a little button that had a little label on it that said, cleverly enough, "push", and the little panel came sliding out of the front - very slick when it worked.

The delivery guys came to install the TV, and the first thing I did when they left was to push the little button that said "push". The panel slid out. "Cool!" I said, and pushed it back in. It slid back out. I pushed it in. It slid out. The button was not involved. "Um." I said. At this point, dad walked into the room.

After everyone in the family went through the drill - push it in, watch it slide out, push it in, watch it slide out, lather, rinse, repeat - it was decided that I was very thoroughly at fault and was never to touch the tv or anything else again for the rest of my life. Alas, I did not heed this advice, much to the dismay of electronic equipment everywhere. There's nothing quite like pushing a play button on a tape recorder and hearing that special "crunch" noise which signifies that something has gone contrary to design. My past is littered with the corpses of broken electronica, their only crime to be used by me for their intended purpose.

During my college years I developed an alarming ability to crash any computer system I came into contact with. To me, this signified an obvious calling to the Computer Sciences. I spent the majority of my college career bring the Emory University CS labs (all of them) to a screeching halt. Things got worse when I starting to learn Distributed Computing, a science concerning the breaking up of huge problems into lots of smaller ones and figuring out how to get the load shared out amongst many systems, and the myriad problems one encounters when one wants to do something insane like this. I went from killing one machine at a time to killing off the entire lab in one fell swoop.

In fact, my area of study or work seems to determine the type of object I am most likely to kill. After school it was the Municpal Electric Authority of Georgia, where I applied my digicidal skills to the power grid, bringing down more than one remote telemetry unit by attempting to push the controlling software in strange directions. After that it was working as Emory University's webmaster when I learned how to bring down www.emory.edu simply by upgrading the hardware and software running the web site. At Indiana University I speciailzed in installing and maintaining (and eventually contributing to) a distributed computing software project called Globus, which at the time was a sure way to slowly kill any system onto which it latched. From there to Cox Radio Interactive, where I discoverd my talent for breaking radio broadcasting platforms by simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time and accidentally "jiggling" a wire which was known by local engineers to be "goosey" but which was neither advertised nor protected in any way.

Now I work for Verizon Wireless. Apparantly my new skill is causing grief with other people's phones simply by calling them to talk.

Sorry about your phone, Megan!