It strikes me that there's a lot of pseudo-
shamans floating around in the
technology industry, and even more people who perceive anyone who can get their
computer working again as such. Moreover, this
phenomenon seems to go back at least to the
mainframe days.
I can't count on a dozen hands the number of times that I've fixed someone's machine for them, and they claim its
magic.
To back up this assertion, check out this from
the jargon file's "
Casting the runes" entry:
A correspondent from
England tells us that one of ICL's most talented systems designers used to be called out occasionally to service machines which the
field circus had given up on. Since he knew the design inside out, he could often find faults simply by listening to a quick outline of the symptoms. He used to play on this by going to some site where the field circus had just spent the last two weeks solid trying to find a fault, and spreading a diagram of the system out on a table top. He'd then shake some chicken bones and cast them over the diagram, peer at the bones intently for a minute, and then tell them that a certain module needed replacing. The system would start working again immediately upon the replacement.