Ancient lore reports the case of a computer that failed, and nobody could find anything wrong until one brave soul dug deep into the innards (in the day when computers were the size of couple of refrigerators) and came up with a dead cockroach that he believed had short circuited a couple of wires.

His report was that the computer quit "because the engineer died."

The story is often cited as the origin of the term "bug" for any defect in performance, but there are better explanations since the "bugs" term was in use long before there were any computers.

For a time, a little later, I ran into a couple of tech support guys who always asked "was there any smoke?" in the hope of getting to tell you that "if the smoke gets out it just quits working."

A fellow worker made a sign that he kept on his desk for a while:

       CONSERVE YOUR SMOKE
   YOU ONLY GET A LITTLE OF IT

And long ago, when computer mice all had a little steel ball in them, lots of users reported "dead mice" when the balls got dirty, so the tech reps (they made house calls then) all carried a bottle of alcohol to clean peoples' balls.

Unforunately, after the balls had been cleaned a few times they got dirty a lot faster, and the phenomenon came to be called "drunken mouse syndrome."

Reps began carrying a few replacement balls when they went out for their regular maintenance inspections, and IBM thought it important enough that they do so that they had signs made, to be posted beside the exit from their own office to be the last thing seen on the way out:

     HAVE YOU GOT YOUR BALLS?

Lots of the signs got a hadnwritten annotation - "You gotta have balls to work here" or local variants on the theme.

(The "balls" signs are considered "collectibles" by some even now, although verifying authenticity is difficult due to reproductions.)

John