Walking Techbane: Difference between revisions

 

* Newton Pulsifer from ''[[Good Omens]]''. As a lad, he caused a black-out throughout his entire house by ''trying to fix a radio'', which is apparently an improvement over the last time he tried that, when he blacked-out ''his entire neighborhood''. He once assembled a joke electronics kit that wasn't ''supposed'' to do anything; when he turned it on, it picked up Radio Moscow. [[The Alleged Car|His car]] breaks down so often, he's taken to calling it "Dick Turpin" (after the famous British highwayman), because "Wherever I go, I hold up traffic." His bad luck with electronics finally comes in handy when he has to sabotage a launch computer at a military base. He does this {{spoiler|after several false starts by ''attempting to fix it'', which is to say, he says "I don't know if I can do that ..." and placing his hand on a console, ''[[Rule of Funny|and everything immediately breaks]]''.}}

* Harry Dresden of ''[[The Dresden Files]]'' shorts out any advanced technology (almost anything past the '50s) because he's a wizard. (Magic makes microscopic improbabilities more probable - and electronics are particularly vulnerable to small current surges.) This occurs to all wizards, but he interacts with [[Muggles]] more often. This forces him to drive an old-school VW Bug and use an old-style stove and icebox in his home.

** It also proves problematic in his more mundane [[Private Detective]] activities because he has to be extremely careful around anything completely modern, like a computer or USB hard-drive, since all information stored therein is often completely wiped. His friends won't let him with 20 feet of a computer (for good reason!).

** It's not just the computer that he has wrecked. He also wrecked several other electrical appliances, and in one arc, he also ended up flooding the house just by attempting to use the dishwasher.

** Other than Roger, there's also an implied instance of this trope in this comic:

'''Johnson:''' ''(offscreen)'' Oops. }}

*** To put it in context, the past three strips had Jason being camped out in front of the computer trying to get tickets for ''[[Attack of the Clones]]'' for what is strongly implied for an extremely long time (as Jason put it, the connection to the Pavilionplex's web server was running slower than a Bantha on Hoth), and the reason for the long delay was revealed to be because one of the Pavilionplex staffers somehow mistook the Pavilionplex's web server for the butter server and soaked it in soapy water, making the staffer applicable for this trope for the sheer stupidity of his action. Also qualifies as an [[Epic Fail]].

** It gets to the point where the owner of a local electronics shop knew immediately what Jean and Scott are in for, and jokes how she's good for business.

** In ''[[X-Men: Evolution]]'', Kitty Pryde is no better.

* Astoria, the titular character from the ''[[Transformers Generation 1]]'' episode "The Girl Who Loved Powerglide"; this turns out to be helpful when the Decepticons try to [[Mind Probe]] her and the probe promptly malfunctions.

** Though when the probe gave its result as being "subject's mind completely empty", it might have been [[The Ditz|on to something]].

* Comes up fairly often on [[Not Always Right]].

* The Usenet newsgroup alt.sysadmin.recovery had tales of [http://groups.google.com/group/alt.sysadmin.recovery/browse_thread/thread/729e94c6bf3082d4/8e142051db9a011b?hl=en&q=telecom+destruction+bunny#8e142051db9a011b The Telecom Destruction Bunny].

* The [[wikipedia:Street light interference phenomenon|Street light interference phenomenon]] is a phenomenon where people allegedly cause street lights to go out just by walking under them.

* Unfortunately inverted by Janice Tunni. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/8520405/Meet-the-woman-allergic-to-electricity.html Due to her being electrosensitive, just being around electromagnetic fields causes her to have physical pain.]