See also, the Pauli effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_effect

The Pauli effect or Pauli's device corollary is the supposed tendency of technical equipment to encounter critical failure in the presence of certain people. The term was coined after mysterious anecdotal stories involving Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, describing numerous instances in which demonstrations involving equipment suffered technical problems only when he was present.

An incident occurred in the physics laboratory at the University of Göttingen. An expensive measuring device, for no apparent reason, suddenly stopped working, although Pauli was in fact absent. James Franck, the director of the institute, reported the incident to his colleague Pauli in Zürich with the humorous remark that at least this time Pauli was innocent. However, it turned out that Pauli had been on a railway journey to Zürich and had switched trains in the Göttingen rail station at about the time of the failure.

R. Peierls describes a case when at one reception this effect was to be parodied by deliberately crashing a chandelier upon Pauli's entrance. The chandelier was suspended on a rope to be released, but it stuck instead, thus becoming a real example of the Pauli effect

Yep. Ghosts in Machines are real.

I have witnessed it first hand multiple times.

At university there was an old 1st gen Makerbot 3D printer and if you took away one of it's prints that were displayed around it, all of your prints would fail, even if you replaced it the printer held a grudge. And never EVER say a 100% certainty statement that the print would succeed like "it is printing ok, it will be finished in an hour". Only say things like "the print is doing ok so far".

The electronics lab was throwing out five old Cathode Ray Oscilloscopes so our little maker group took them in and two were working fine. The other three weren't displaying the trace on the screen. One of our members, a chap from Romania who in his youth spent his time fixing old TVs in his home country, said to let him have a look. I swear down he plugged them in, leant his ear against it, said to the scopes "shh it's ok, we'll look after you", and gave them gentle taps on top just behind the screen, and all three jumped back into life in perfect calibration.

And finally, my girlfriend at the time had a 1st gen iPod that would, at the most inopportune moments randomly wake itself up, play a few seconds of a random song, then shut itself down.

i was in a group call with 6 mathematicians, and it came time to order our names in the paper we were writing. in math papers, the names are always ordered alphabetically. we had to pull up a picture of the alphabet because none of us could remember which way the letters are ordered.

Thought emporium said that microbiologists are the most super stitisous and that if it took sacrificing a goat to get better results they would

Science is about empiricism, so i would expect scientists to try out the occult from time to time.

Pascal's wager with respect to machinery, maybe the toys don't help, but what if they do?

Anyone who builds their own PC kit knows about the Blood Sacrifice

So scientists are warhammer orcs?

Whatever you do, do not touch that one BNC cable. Just trust me on this.

My PI: "Oh, we don't use that microcentrifuge, it will ruin your results" Me: "Oh damn, how long has it been broken for?" PI: "No, it's not broken. It's cursed "

I thought this was just exasperated hyperbole, but nah, there's a lot of superstition here.

I have some low-level projects where I am responsible for every byte of code running on very simple hardware.

There's still problems where I throw my hands up and say "Nope, haunted. I'll try again later."

Can verify: I work at a research laboratory and I can't tell you how many Trump stickers I have seen on bumpers. These are people who mostly have either an engineering masters or a science PhD, and they still believe in fairy tales like voting works.

Oh no, the orks became smart enough to he scientists, the green tide is too big to stop now

I work at an MSP and we all have little shrines of random shit on our desks that we've collected. The one guy has a mini filing cabinet under his desk of tech shit that's nearly as old as I am (I'm 27).

If we are ever told that we can't have our shrines, we'll all be devastated.

Either that or the lab equipment is infused with the souls of children.

Ponder and his fellow students watched Hex carefully. 'It can't just, you know, stop,' said Adrian 'Mad Drongo' Tumipseed. 'The ants are just standing still,' said Ponder. He sighed. 'All right, put the wretched thing back.' Adrian carefully replaced the small fluffy teddy bear above Hex's keyboard. Things immediately began to whirr. The ants started to trot again. The mouse squeaked. They'd tried this three times.

Ponder looked again at the single sentence Hex had written. +++ Mine! Waaaah +++ 'I don't actually think,' he said, gloomily, 'that I want to tell the Archchancellor that this machine stops working if we take its fluffy teddy bear away. I just don't think I want to live in that kind of world.' 'Er,' said Mad Drongo, 'you could always, you know, sort of say it needs to work with the FTB enabled... 'You think that's better?' said Ponder, reluctantly. It wasn't as if it was even a very realistic interpretation of a bear. 'You mean, better than "fluffy teddy bear"?' Ponder nodded. 'It's better,' he said.

Well now I gotta build a shrine in my lab. The COF tester, GC, and our UPC tester are all behaving badly.