this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2026
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me_irl
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I call that the IT aura. I know it can't be proven but I swear it is a thing. You're called because some device is misbehaving and the moment you look at it, it starts behaving and the person who called you gets mad because "it wasn't working when I called you".
One of my first jobs was office machine repair tech. About 10% of the calls I did were "could not replicate problem".
Machines have always just worked for me. I dunno.
That's 100% a thing, I walk in and things know to start working OR ELSE.
If I'm ever stumped, I know all I need to do to get something working is escalate the issue, it'll fix itself before the other guy gets there
The reason that happens is because people don't have patience.
So if they call IT, they are forced to wait 5 minutes until they come over. By which time the process was able to finish and the problem is gone.
I have seen it happen, from both sides, with various issues that are not "patience related".
I’ve heard it called “Technician’s Curse” and it applies to other trades too: if the person who can fix the problem is readily available, the problem cannot be replicated.
One of my tech jobs we'd use this aura strategically. Any time we couldn't get something to work for long enough it was becoming a problem, we'd go to someone higher rank than us. Didn't even have to tell each other what was wrong just "hey I need you to look at something", they'd walk in, usually it would start working, everyone nods, they go back to what they were doing. If people didn't nod then the higher up would actually sit down and we'd describe the problem