My father-in-law once told me a story about a
service call he answered while working at
IBM years ago. The caller was apparently having difficulty with her
typewriter. Her memos were very hard to read. They contained characters that she hadn't typed including a great deal of unexplainable
spaces, m's, x's and c's. This had been going on for quite some time and she felt there was something
wrong with the typewriter.
So he gathered up his
tools and went to check it out. He performed all the
standard tests on the machine and declared it in perfect
working order. He even typed up a few paragraphs to prove his point. The caller was insistant that there was a problem, producing some of her mis-typed memos. My father-in-law studied the memos and with
dawning realization, politely asked her to go ahead and type a memo for him.
She obliged and the problem became apparent to him almost immediately: her
breasts,
being quite large, rested partially on the keyboard as she typed, causing the
mysterious characters on the memo.
Biting back
laughter, he asked her to sit back from the typewriter the slightest bit and continue typing. She did so and was amazed that the problem was gone. His explanation, quite
politically correct I think, was that the human body emits a sort of
magnetic field on the typewriter if you sit too close, causing it to
randomly generate characters. She was quite pleased with this and later placed a call to his
supervisor, commending him and explaining in detail the entire visit.