I’d really hate it if this blog were to develop a reputation for having posts which were probably untrue. I promise that all of the stories on here are my exact recollections of things that happened and, with gaps that I can’t remember, I fill it in with what almost certainly did happen. As such, this is a story I’ve held off of writing because it’s just so weird. There was another story I had like that too but that one happened to me a long time ago when I was only a little boy, so I guess that one has an excuse for being weird. This anecdote, on the other hand, comes from 2006 and is still fairly fresh in my memory.
I was in a Maths lesson (one of my favourite classes) and, as a change, we were all working on laptops and doing something on Microsoft Excel. Everything was going perfectly normally until the laptop starting typing all by itself. I don’t mean that the keys were actually moving and going inward as if somebody were pressing them (that would be silly) what I mean is, that words were appearing on the screen as if somebody was typing. This happened anywhere I clicked which, understandably, made using Excel hard because I’d try to enter a value but then random other words would appear.
I put up my hand and said to the teacher “I have a problem with my computer.”
“What is it?” he said when he came over.
“Well, look at this, it just types by itself.”
I clicked on a cell in Excel and the following words wrote themself “Look out of the window, you’ll see that they sky is quite grey. It’s been like this all day but don’t worry it’s not going to rain. It’ll be about ten degrees outside all day.” (all of that was correct, by the way.)
I held down the delete key before it could write anymore.
“Oh, right. Well, just try to ignore it,” was his slightly unhelpful advice.
So for the rest of the lesson I continued trying to use Excel and simply deleting any words that the laptop managed to get out. I regret not clicking on Microsoft Word and letting it fill a whole word document with what it had to say, it’d have been interesting to find out, but at the time I wanted to get on with the work (which, funnily enough, I can’t remember).
Can anybody solve this mystery? Where were these words coming from? I would assume that the keyboard was broken, but if that were the cause I would expect random gibberish, rather than actual words in sentences, to be typed. So, I can’t think of any rational explanation for this (though I’m sure there is one).
I was in a Maths lesson (one of my favourite classes) and, as a change, we were all working on laptops and doing something on Microsoft Excel. Everything was going perfectly normally until the laptop starting typing all by itself. I don’t mean that the keys were actually moving and going inward as if somebody were pressing them (that would be silly) what I mean is, that words were appearing on the screen as if somebody was typing. This happened anywhere I clicked which, understandably, made using Excel hard because I’d try to enter a value but then random other words would appear.
I put up my hand and said to the teacher “I have a problem with my computer.”
“What is it?” he said when he came over.
“Well, look at this, it just types by itself.”
I clicked on a cell in Excel and the following words wrote themself “Look out of the window, you’ll see that they sky is quite grey. It’s been like this all day but don’t worry it’s not going to rain. It’ll be about ten degrees outside all day.” (all of that was correct, by the way.)
I held down the delete key before it could write anymore.
“Oh, right. Well, just try to ignore it,” was his slightly unhelpful advice.
So for the rest of the lesson I continued trying to use Excel and simply deleting any words that the laptop managed to get out. I regret not clicking on Microsoft Word and letting it fill a whole word document with what it had to say, it’d have been interesting to find out, but at the time I wanted to get on with the work (which, funnily enough, I can’t remember).
Can anybody solve this mystery? Where were these words coming from? I would assume that the keyboard was broken, but if that were the cause I would expect random gibberish, rather than actual words in sentences, to be typed. So, I can’t think of any rational explanation for this (though I’m sure there is one).