Does instruments have feelings?

[Berni]

Yep this is also where Murphy's law comes from. You just remember the times a lot better when something really goes wrong.

But i still swear my old inkjet printer had a urgency sensor in it to refuse to print only when the level is above a threshold. Until i bought a color laser printer and couldn't be happier with its reliable performance.

[metrologist]

I foresee an animated movie featuring test equipment as the characters.  Or perhaps a live action movie which is more like Christine.

Drop an AllSpark fragment in your lab.

[L_Euler]

Yes, they have feelings and are usually unreasonably sensitive. But it’s all about managing expectations. Sit them down, calmly explain what is going on, and ease them into the new reality.  Might also help to have grief counselors waiting on the sidelines.

[IDEngineer]

This thread is hilarious and very enjoyable.

With respect to anthropomorphizing test equipment... I am honest enough to admit that when I purchased my most recent oscilloscope, I said to my wife "I think it's time to invite another scope into the family".

And she didn't think it was weird.

I definitely married the right girl! 

[bsfeechannel]

My guitar gently weeps.

[coppercone2]

can a hydralisk jump?

[Zenith]

Allow me to slightly reword this comment:

What I have seen is that test and development equipment fails in the middle of a project, when you least want it to, presenting you with a difficult repair you have to do before you can continue with what you are doing.

1000% THIS!!! I can't count the number of times I'm deep in some development project and suddenly a scope gives me trouble, or I reveal some hitherto unknown bug in the compiler or IDE, etc. My head is buried in the project's details, it's all organized in my brain, I'm "one with" everything that's happening, I can feel that the answer is moments away - and then my development environment has an issue that stops the entire process dead. POW, the mindset is lost... I have to unwind the mental stack and switch contexts to work on my freakin' R&D gear just so I can get back to what I was actually supposed to be doing. Even if the fix only takes a few minutes, it can take an hour or more to re-establish the environment and get my head completely back into the game.

To be rational about this, if you are using the equipment intensively for days or weeks, statistically it's more likely to fail in a period like that. Then there's a mental filter where things of special significance figure large, and having your concentration and thread of thought broken when it's taken days to build is one. Then our brains are tuned to see certain patterns, partticularly in terms of people and animals and we can see them were there are none; faces in the fire, those photos which turn up in the daily rags from time to time -  snow on a hedge which looks like Jesus. There's a temptation to give complex inanimate objects names and personalities; Thomas the Tank Engine; some people give their cars names - Felicity Ford. There's a Fawlty Towers episode where John Cleese's car lets him down at an awkward time and he tells it he's warned it and warned it and it won't listen, so he's now going to give it a damned good thrashing - which he does.

This thread's a lot of fun and it can certainly seem that test equipment has got it in for you and picks its time carefully. It's boring being rational all the time.

[Zenith]

This thread is hilarious and very enjoyable.

With respect to anthropomorphizing test equipment... I am honest enough to admit that when I purchased my most recent oscilloscope, I said to my wife "I think it's time to invite another scope into the family".

And she didn't think it was weird.

I definitely married the right girl! 

Presumably she thought it was happy, confident  and alert and she was impressed by the way it came up and made friends straight away. It wasn't the smallest one which ran off and hid in the corner as soon as it saw you, and seemed dopey and morose.

[JohnPen]

Years back when fixing a friends valve based Colour TV when I arrived to fix it the picture was often breaking up no vert or horiz hold.  I approached the set and it started working perfectly again.  Whatever I tested, tried etc could not bring the fault back.   I said to the friend leave the set on and I will come back in an hour or so.   On returning the friend commented that the set became faulty again just after you left.  I reached the door into the room where the set was it was still failing.  I approached the set and once again it started working again.  Having assumed the set wanted to be nice to me only when I was present  I told my friend to give me a call when it stayed faulty.   Finally a week or so later it stayed failed for long periods.  My return didn't encourage it to work again either.   However the fault was traceable and found to be a hairline crack in the PCB,  which had valves mounted on it, that was expanding and contracting due to temperature variations.  Bridging the crack cured the problem.  Did the set have feelings and like me at first.  or did it then sulk    because I didn't stay and look after it who knows?
 

[ogden]

Even simple tools can have feelings - if you do not take good care of them, they may let you down