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Ghosts Inside The Machine
November 1, 2007

Was your Halloween filled with strangeness and / or do you believe that there are ghosts inside the machine? If you’re a believer - Halloween is a time for ghosts, goblins and things that go bump in the night. This week our intrepid traveler was working in Gettysburg PA, an area rich in American history. Besides the Battle of Gettysburg and the Gettysburg address, Gettysburg also has a history of ghost sightings.

My question is this, if something unusual things on Halloween is it related to All Hallows Eve or just something that happens randomly that we attribute to some strange folklore we call Halloween? I spent Halloween doing PDF training at a company on the battlefields of Gettysburg which is rumored to have some soldiers roaming around. At this plant our spirit was called “The Colonial” who according to rumors was buried nearby. Some staff talk about things that have been moved or suspicious shadows they have seen late in the night.

This week the “The Colonial” decided to play some tricks on me. At least that’s the explanation the staff gave me after a week filled with computer crashes, freezes and reinstallation problems. Even to a computer savvy guy these problems seemed unusual. Sudden and frequent crashes. Reinstallations that failed as the computers were asking for disks that did not exist. And more then once the entire Adobe suite had to be uninstalled and then reinstalled. Experiencing these problems while trying to train people could make you  consider smashing the computers to smithereens.

So I spent almost as much time running hard disk diagnostic and repair utilities as teaching preflight and repair of PDF training. So you decide. Are these problems normal or are there ghosts in the machines?

Posted by Howie Fenton on November 1, 2007 | Comments (0)