Hold everything, you must read this: Make me one with everything:
…Margret then tried Steve’s problem. “Computer crashes every day sometime between noon and 1PM, but never the exact same time.”
“Lunching colleagues use coffeepot in adjacent room. When heating element turns off, a minor electrical surge induces a magnetic field in the extension cord Steve has wrapped around the steel leg of his desk next to the computer. The solution is to unwind the cord.”
The omniscient Indian friend on the other end of the phone line placidly answered all of Margret’s questions, until she came to the last. This one had been given to her by Adam, who taught computer science at the local university. His problem wasn’t a technical support issue, really, but during the flow of the dinnertime conversation it seemed a funny thing to add to a list of ponderables; what if you gave them a problem you knew was impossible to solve? Adam had reassured Margret that this one was the worst of the bunch, unsolved since 1936 when it was invented by one of the earliest of all computer scientists, and mathematically proven to be unsolvable…
Thanks to Derek Woolverton for the link…
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