This troper has dubbed himself the Anti-devisor. He once uploaded a virus into all of his elementary school (Yes, I'm the same guy from the Noodle Incident page that said he killed off most school computers.) has accidentally uploaded malware into computers... oh, almost every time he touches one, finds a new disturbing glitch in Super Smash Bros. Brawl every time he plays, and seemingly broke the laws of physics when doing a lab in chemistry.

This troper has concluded that she is a walking new-game-bane. No sooner do I praise Pokemon [=SoulSilver=] than I get stuck in Azalea Town, unable to proceed past Bugsy and his cheating bitch of a level 17 Scyther. (And I say "bitch" because the Scyther is female. [I would grind, but the only Pokemon I can find are in the Ilex Forest, and even then they're only low-level Pokemon that give out very little EXP.]) And no sooner do I praise SonicColors than I get stuck in pretty much the first part of Starlight Carnival Act 2, because apparently I need to jump up somewhere and I CAN'T.

This troper has no trouble with software, often being used as a kind of common sense tech support, and her Google-fu is second-to-none. But when it comes to hardware? She's had everything happen from a Starcraft disc ''shattering inside the disc drive'' to quite sensically transferring the files off a thumb drive that was literally falling to pieces onto a laptop that died not two weeks later - and having a newer thumb drive fail abruptly for no reason shortly thereafter (though she did eventually manage to get her files off by jiggling the thing just so - the laptop-backup'd ones were still LostForever). Note, however, that the Starcraft shard-filled computer suffered no ill effects other than losing an RW drive, at least until the cooling fan blew out. That got fixed eventually - and despite her Googling up the fix to the Windows Update that kills screws up your Internet, it eventually succumbed to an endless reboot cycle. Probably fixable, but by then a new computer was deemed the simplest solution. Not to mention the laptop lost to housecat + stupidly placed tea glass (despite the troper's attentive supervision from a mere three feet away)... unlike the last ''two'' hand-me-down laptops she's killed, that one at least started up again afterward - but with the screen no longer working, no point trying to get her files off. The screen thing was probably only due to the water exacerbating the effects of the United States Postal Service deciding that the best way to deliver a laptop-sized package was not via a more typical door delivery, but by somehow managing to cram/stuff it into a mailbox in the wee hours of a Colorado morning in ''February''. The day after losing this laptop, the troper's mother-in-law also lost her laptop to a liquid spill - and a few months later and half a country away, the friend who'd mailed her her old laptop in the first place lost the laptop that had been bought to replace it by spilling coffee on it. Note, however, that both were able to get their files off before their laptops bit it completely. And let's not get into the individual issues of these slightly-used laptops - one was prone to overheats (and had a jumble of random crap programs from her mother-in-law that took forever to delete), the tea-killed one occasionally would not come back from sleep mode (a red flag in itself), though really the only complaint the previous owner had had about it was a lack of RAM. Naturally, none of the RAM from the previous laptops fit in this one. Then there was the time this troper got to use her sister-in-law's computer for a year while she was out of the country - and once she came back, naturally I burnt all my acquired files to a few discs. (Finally, a switch to first person!) Had I paid closer attention, I might have noticed only half of my music got burned... and of course, the final, most hastily-done disc, containing much miscellany, was the one I did not double-check before deleting my files off her computer and therefore the disc that corrupted and failed to write any data at all. Since then, my sister-in-law's computer has failed to run at any speed above molasses, despite a reinstall of Windows. And that has been the last four years of my life, more or less. At least I have an external hard drive now - I wanted two, but this was deemed needlessly paranoid. Four (or five) computers in as many years? We'll see. Meanwhile, the computer my mother gave me in high school still works just fine, tucked away in my dad's house somewhere - Windows ME and all.

Humorous example from this very morning, though: Troper's husband was showing off some video game emulation - only for the program to fail to read the rom properly. After he fiddles with a few things, retries a few times, troper wanders out of room in boredom - only for a cry of triumph to ensue just as I shut the door behind me. I return - but now the program won't read his save states for some reason! As he puzzles this out, I attempt to leave again... no prizes for guessing when the save states kicked in. Said husband also has a knack for being a WalkingTechfix - if you ask him to take a look at a problem on your computer, it will vanish almost before he's in the room (much to the irritation of everyone else in his family).

Actually, Blizzard discs are quite notorious for shattering in the drive. I myself have had a Warcraft III disc crack badly while being used, and my copy of Diablo II cracked in half. I also had a game by a different company detonate in the drive with enough force to spew shrapnel out of the *closed* drive shelf. Note, these were three different [=CDs=] in three different drives. I've had some fairly lousy luck, but oddly enough, in all other ways, I seem to be an inversion, as my sisters laptop only ''starts'' working when I'm around...

This troper knows of one girl who is a personification of this trope. Interesting in that she has familiarity with computers. Can cause wireless routers to short out from across the house or break iTunes or cause IM programs to curl up and die.

This editor has a good friend who seems to break computers in a local radius. She's actually been banned from friends' computer rooms.

This Troper may do okay with most larger electronics, but the little ones.... He has managed to fry two tamagotchi, and cannot wear a digital watch without making it go ''funny''. This, interestingly, is hereditary - his mother is the exact same way. Ironically, they're also avid computer users. (Said computers are... usually unaffected. usually.)

This troper's brother is the living embodiment of this trope. To date: Two watches destroyed by battery acid, 4 years after they should have died; 2 stereos; 2 CD players; his old computer

This troper, despite being fairly tech-savvy, is pretty sure he's been cursed with this trope. He has never had a single electronic device that something didn't go wrong with.

This one, too, in a way. For instance, his Playstation 3 refuses to connect to his wireless LAN and his PC runs on Vista, which should be enough explanation.

in a Real Life Example, this Troper is on her 3rd laptop in 3 years and even it is currently needing a motherboard replaced, her friend found the explanation here.

THIS troper is the same, only with other people's computers. I SWEAR that even though I got into the bios, that all I did was hit escape and exit. I didn't TOUCH any of the settings, even I know better.

That explanation is inverted by this troper. She's an artist. She also builds all of her own computers and is the go-to tech support person for her family, both because of her knowledge and for the fact that misbehaving electronic devices tend to behave in her presence. She suspects that the fact that she can trigger motion sensors while she's ''five feet out of their range'' might possibly have something to do with this.

Another troper is married to someone with the above troper's talent for curing misbehavior in electronic devices without actually doing any repairs. She's seen him straighten out misbehaving computers by looking at the screen to see what's going on.

Also inverted for this troper. Although she isn't so much an artist anymore, she has a decent knowledge of computers and electronics. Likely why she always ends up being the tecchie in most of her classes (as well as absolute laziness/unwillingness to help from any other actual tecchies). She attributes it to the Techfix gene her father has, who likely has to put up with a lot of Techbanes in his line of work (computer repairman).

CURSE YOU, ACCURSED TROPER. What has been seen - *beep fizzle sclurp*

This troper's classmate in the CCNA class makes computers DIE by his touch. He touched the troper's computer and it went completely berserk.

You probably shouldn't have shuffled across the floor in fuzzy bunny slippers.

Inverted for this Troper's sister; she seems to have a magical iPod-healing touch.

Inverted for me too. I managed to get the car out of second gear in two seconds - my mom had been fussing with it for ten minutes.

This troper, being a Warhammer40000 player, tends to say "I can ''hear'' the Machine Spirit laughing/mocking me" fairly often, since computer systems have a tendency to disobey him.

Narrower example: Every time this troper attempts to use it, the sewing machine breaks. In the same way, even. And I'm sure that I'm not just doing it wrong or something.

This troper advises checking the bobbin to make sure it's not in backwards.

This troper has the same problem, only that they always break in Interesting New Ways. Sometimes even without direct interaction.

Inverted for this troper: I'm called when a techbane has broken something. My presence usually fixes things. If not, pressing a random button has a good chance. Electric equipment works for me ''years'' past the time where it should have failed a long time ago (this is a good thing, because most of it is expensive, and I'm a bum). All that said, I have no clue how to ''physically'' fix broken equipment...

Ditto. It's gotten so ridiculous that this troper has actually been called the "Jesus of Machines." Fun title to use as a pickup line.

Same with this troper. I make a living doing on-site Tech Support, but I have very little actual knowledge. Most of the time, computers start working as soon as I enter the room. Failing that, a swift kick with a consecrated wrench...

Same here, hell this post is coming from a pc a good three years past its expected life span. Unfortunately the rest of the family are techbane in the traditional sense, the power button on our television used to fail to turn it on randomly for everyone but this troper.

Same here, too. This one like computers, but he really know very little about them. Mainly due to willpower and possible divine intervention, his rig has lasted six or seven years with minimal problems. This troper doesn't know why. Unfortunately, I don't really have quite as good a power as the above tropers - it seems to only apply to this specific computer.

Happened to me many times. The most recent example was at the hospital (for someone else). The nurse was trying to fill out the release forms on a laptop, and it kept erroring out. After the 3rd time, I reached out (I was sitting next to it) and stroked one finger along the side of the screen. It then worked perfectly. This is ''not'' unusual.

This CS [=MSc=] troper sometimes feels like a techbane. Although he does make software do what he wants, any OS he touches is slowly.. twisted.. into an unholy abomination and bane of all that is sane. Also, any electronics he touches die before their time. Just like the software, come to think of it. While he's good at what he does, certain others have made the comment that he works by vampirically sucking computrons out of whatever he touches to build his software, and there is inevitably spillage.

While this troper seems to have USB fingers (most [=PCs=] he works with operate happily for almost well beyond their natural runtimes, AND I have installed Windows 98SE without problems before), he can static out FM radios by standing a certain distance from them, AND has shorted out street lamps while walking past them before. My mother is also most incompetent with our TV remotes.

This Troper is hated by machines both simple and complex-- the computer is ''usually'' okay, as long as I don't do anything but goof around, but for any serious use it's better I not be in the room. And mechanical devices fare far worse, motor vehicles in particular. Fortunately I live not far from some relatives who are WalkingTechfix. My mother carries the fully dominant Techbane gene, having destroyed more technology in her day than I've even inconvenienced. My father also has the Techfix gene, and luckily so, as he's a former nuclear submarine engineer, a profession with a high degree of natural selection against Techbanes.

This troper's mother used to associate with an older gentleman (until he passed on, sadly) who felt this about himself; oftentimes he would invite her out to lunch as the pretext for asking her to take a look at his laptop.

This Troper can shut off his girlfriend's wireless connection with his presence... at will.

This Troper is impressed and ever so slightly envious.

Works both ways with this troper. She seems to have the ability to make a computer work just by looking at it, but she measures her age in motherboards she's fried.

In high school, microscope globes would blow if they were turned on near this troper. If she stood on the other side of the room, no problem. Similarly, in university, this troper and her partner ALWAYS end up with the hotplate/voltmeter/etc that doesn't work. No matter which counter we pick to work at. Even if we don't touch it at all and let the demonstrator turn it on for us.

I have had the computer suddenly shut off on me. Even using a cooling pad, nice computer, playing Minesweeper. After that that computer (which I now call the compooper) never works. Though strangely, it's just [=PCs=] and Macs. (mostly macs) I once fixed a N64 by kicking it against a wall!

This Troper swears he has Murphy's Hands, and amongst their powers it to instantly corrupt or outrightly destroy any electronics device he touches. His latest computer mysteriously fried its own motherboard. Not to mention the [=MP3=]-player, where he managed to get the touch-sensitive buttons somehow stuck. It's sad. ;_;

This troper seems to invert this trope. Computers which are broken seem to start working again. He recently managed to save his data when he dieing hard-drive began allowing his computer to boot from it again (thus it was backed up on a USB drive, then transfered to a new HDD. All three hardrives are now connected to the computer and mysteriously working perfectly, although the broken one is still on its last legs...

This troper is also a techbane. Sure I can use internet and some other things, but over all technology hates me. My friends have a strict rule of me not touching their laptops. However, my techbaneness is most prevailent in soda machines of all things; they have a tendency of eating my money (mutiple times) but worked just fine for the person before and after me. It got to the point that I have to get a friend to get the drink.

This troper doesn't have it to the point of it actually being able to prevent her from using technology - the problems are usually either temporary/fixable or merely somewhat inconvenient - but if a piece of electronic equipment's going to inexplicably fail, odds are good that it'll be while she's using it.

First of all, her iPod's broken ''twice'' while on vacation, and ''only'' while on vacation. Once it was just in need of a reset (possibly brought on by having its battery drained a lot), but the other time its iPod software somehow managed to get corrupted while she had it on as she slept.

Her digital camera recently died, first displaying a sort of purple static and then just blackness on its little viewscreen, although the menu still worked fine; she used it a lot before it was technically given to her, and during that time it started making a sort of whirring sound when the lens slid out, when it had previously been much quieter.

Her original, desktop computer has never actually been rendered inoperable, but it's become a lot slower than its specs would seem to predict, even though it ran fine when she first got it. It also makes alarming sounds when it starts up and has a much louder whir (and more asymmetrical -- it's more of a "''whee''oo", if you'll excuse my poor attempt to transliterate it, than a constant hum) than it used to.

Have you been defragging its HDD, virus-scanning it, cleaning up unnecessary files, etc regularly? That tends to be what slows computers down as they get older.

Yeah, I give it semifrequent defrags (and I recently bought a completely new HDD), and I have a virus scanner (the AVG suite), although the only thing it's ever turned up is a handful of tracking cookies even as my computer moves at the speed of a stoned slug, so I'm not convinced that it works properly.

The biggest casualty of her techbane-itude was her first laptop, HAL; when it was ''working'' it ran fine, but in the ten months she had it, it first displayed a weird problem where the monitor would go sort of staticky and then turn black, eventually rendering it impossible to use except in one case where it ran passably well for about half an hour after being left off for several days. It was sent away to some laptop-repair guys, who diagnosed it as having a broken motherboard; when this was fixed, HAL was back to normal. However, a couple months later, the troper came back from a vacation to find that his battery life had been reduced to about two minutes, rather than the twoish hours she'd been able to coax out of it before. And then, when the battery had been rendered useless except as a sort of UPS that lasted long enough to get the power cord plugged back in, the power supply itself failed, killing HAL for good (or at least putting him into SuspendedAnimation) because a replacement was unlikely to be available.

Oh, and our sewing machine has immediately broken the last two times I tried to use it. That didn't happen back when I was a kid and I used it to make (crappy) clothes for my dolls, which is particularly strange.

This troper magnetically attracts things going wrong with his laptop - and, to a lesser extent, anything else computer-related.

It's a Vista; he hasn't installed XP from the backup discs, because he enjoys bitching about Vista too much.

The Vista condition has brought with it a vast number of games that simply Do Not Work on Vista; {{Oddworld}}: Abe's Exoddus, KnightsOfTheOldRepublic II: ElectricBoogaloo without a patch, the NeverwinterNights expansions...

Many of the games that ''do'' work on Vista go horribly wrong; after patching, KnightsOfTheOldRepublic II would regularly develop bands of brightly coloured static, StarCraft periodically enters a state of complete colour chaos, and DwarfFortress didn't work until he noticed that there were a second set of numbers that could be accessed with the Function key (although this is more a result of personal stupidity).

Upon discovering that he'd wasted money on a wireless adaptor because one came pre-installed, attempting to access the landlord's broadband account required a cable to the main modem...which was in said landlord's room, and said landlord simply wasn't comfortable with this.

When the cable requirement spontaneously stopped being a requirement, things went fine for a while...until for no good reason network scanning blew up. Can't even use a LAN cable, and logging in takes ten minutes to load if it's been properly shut down (necessitating near-permanent hibernation); and it won't say what happened, because the System Event Notification Service service has taken the hit - rather like a meteor knocking out the meteor-damage-detection system. Now that this has happened, the volume indicator (of all things) periodically goes 'fuzzy'.

Finally, other people's electronics are endangered by his close presence; printers in his family's house regularly shut down, stop working, or begin overheating after producing one page, and a friend's alleged computer managed to burn out its motherboard while he was nearby. He was half-tempted to have a friend put this into TvTropes, so he doesn't risk sending another machine straight to Hell on the error express.

Oh, ItGotWorse - now it can't run ''DawnOfWar'' in full screen, the touch pad has stopped working, and thanks to carelessness, the slot at the back has broken off. This isn't static charges, and only one problem is actual carelessness - most of it's just ''the machine spirits don't like me''.

Update: the touch pad now works properly, but it's started overheating to a significant degree while trying to rename pictures. ''It's winter in Australia''.

Some people do have a natural static or magnetic charge; this troper's mother is a scientist who can't use certain pieces of equipment because they detect her, fudging the results.

This troper is sure he's one of these; the most recent (and hilariously bad) example would be the fate of his laptop. First, the family dog took a fairly healthy leak on it while it was running, frying it entirely. Then, when he took it in to his local Best Buy to try and get the hard drive recovered, he found out later that the damage was so severe ''it caught their adapter on fire''. Let's just say his reaction to this news was...understandable.

This troper has a friend, who either he, his mother, his dog, or his house is a tech bane. This troper refuses to take anything more than a datastick to his house, which he will not take back. In his house, the TV changes channels when the dog scratches himself, the volume gos crazy when certain pantry doors are opened and closed, the TV remote only works when it is pointed out the open window, his laptops fry themselves for no reason, his PC randomly turns on, even after buying a new one, and putting it in a different place on a different desk, and many other random things, including three X-box 360s (all of which I bought) stopping working as soon as they enter the house (no Red Ring of Death) (the first one was knocked over by me, so we thought that was the problem, the second I hooked up at my house to make sure it worked before taking it over, and well, it works only with HD now, and with strange colors, and the final one just stopped working the moment it passed the threshold of his house. Experimenting with where exactly they stopped working would have cost a fourth one, and this troper really did not want to pay for that.

On the other hand, this troper himself is an inverse of the Techbane, able to get computers to work without any professional knowledge. As a rule of thumb, if it uses electronics, and has a screen, I can use it, and I can get it working again, as long as the hardware is intact. I also have one other little talent, namely I can feel electronics. I can walk into a house and tell how many currently running monitors and [=TVs=] there are, along with a few other electronics. This has come at a great price though. A friend turned on a huge system, and it gave me such a bad headache, that I was floored with a bloody nose.

This troper seems to be able to break Cyber Optic mice by simply touching them.

Either this troper's hometown has a large number of ''extremely'' faulty street lights and said troper just has amazing timing, or he's a minor techbane. Street lights ''will'' go off with regularity right as he's walking by, or when he merely fixes his gaze upon them. However, most other technology in his life has far ''fewer'' problems than they've any right having (his computer, for example, lasting 7 years without significant problems when it's a cheap model meant to be replaced in 2 years, at the most). The daughter of a friend has similar issues with street lights, by the by.

This troper inverts this trope in that he seems to possess the power to cause computers to start working by sitting and staring at them for a bit.

Any time I try to use something other than a word processor or the internet, the technology gods frown upon me, and I receive their mighty wrath in the form of an unholy error message.

This troper's dad was an Electrical Engineering major at Purdue in the 70s. His senior year, some major corporation gave the university a "computer-aided design workstation", except that it had sat at that corporation for years, never assembled, with people periodically pulling something out of it to make something else work, or dumping unrelated electronics boards into it. Thus, by the time dad was told to "get it working" as his senior project, it was basically just a huge collection of largely unrelated electronics. He still somehow managed to get various aspects of it, and eventually the entire system, to work... for a little while at a time. It became quite entertaining for the others using the same lab, that every time he'd get something working, he'd call Prof. Mal (his prof for the project) down to check it out, and it blinked out just as Mal arrived. ''Every single time!'' This culminated in him finally getting it all working, and neither announced nor called (so no one in the room knew he was coming, making the ad-hoc test double-blind), Mal dropped in for a visit. He opens the door just as dad stands up and shouts "Its been working for 15 minutes!!!". Mal did a heel-turn, and left without a word. Dad got an A on the project, based solely on eye-witness testimony, without the prof giving the grade ever once seeing it run, and the labmates nicknamed the contraption "the Professor Mal Detector".

This troper's father, all the way. He can't so much as press a computer's "on" button without frying the motherboard, and that's only a ''slight'' exaggeration. It's not like he doesn't have help at hand, what with his wife being a programmer and his youngest son (yours truly) a technician. He's just one of those people most comfortable with a Windows 95 and a VCR.

This troper is fine with technology, but can't wear watches. Or pedometers, or anything that requires a battery. They last about a day before they just stop.

This troper does this to software. Wireless drivers fail to work, media players cause bluescreens, and an IM client once wiped his hard drive. Oddly enough, this just drives his hacker desire further. Software one writes oneself can't possibly mutate in that way, right?

This troper isn't personally afflicted, but her mage character in the {{Marvel}} RPG campaign she's in is, to the point where the team leader once gave her some top-secret, illegally obtained technology for a mission, figuring that accidentally wrecking it would actually do them a favor by getting rid of the incriminating evidence and wiping out any risk of the bad guys getting a hold of it. It's mostly played for laughs whenever it's brought up though, such as with the mysterious Blackberry Incident. Fittingly enough, one of her favored strategies is to summon a horde of literal gremlins to tear apart whatever tech the enemy is using to give them the advantage.

This Tropette. I bricked three iPods in a month, broke the internet at my school ''twice,'' and caused four fuses to go out after walking by the fuse box.

This troper is an everything bane, but only to things he doesn't use frequently. As long as he interacts with an item once a week or so it's fine. Otherwise everything breaks. Including keyboards. In half. Without touching them.

A friend of this troper's has this problem too, despite not only being competent with computers, but actually a network tech. Computers just plain act ''peculiar'' around her, crashing, running mysteriously slowly, experiencing issues that nobody else sees, etc. For whatever reason, while she was pregnant her "bogon field", for want of a better word, vanished. It came back again full-force after delivery - except when her daughter is around. ''Spooky.''

This troper is known as "The Burrito Killer." Space evidently folds differently for around 3 feet in any direction. A folded object with low friction (like a burrito, or his knife sample kit) folded within that range behaves normally, as does one outside that range. But passing objects through the range causes them to fail catastrophically, with much spilling of guacamole and sharp objects. In addition, battery life is notoriously unstable. Dead phones will recharge, but a starting full charge will last only minutes at times. And explosions are more likely to occur with anything flammable. Including that pinnacle of flame technology: the wax candle. Seriously, he always lights candles at arms length for this reason.

This Troper cannot use a computer within five feet of any wireless device. The Internet will blink out. Not the wireless, the ''Internet''. Battery life is extremely unstable as well- she can start out with a fully charged laptop, phone, or iPod, and be down to a quarter the charge within minutes. Also, virus software has an annoying habit of not working properly when she's near it.

Printers enjoy failing on me when I ''really'' need that final paper.

This troper's grandma is like this. Her computer always has something wrong with it (To the point that my uncle and I have gotten sick of having to constantly fix it), and it never goes a day without getting some new virus. However, there was the benefit of her only knowing how to do the most basic stuff on it; allowing me to easily hide my games on there without her ever noticing.

This troper's brother and father are like this. Technology fails around them. However, since this troper can usually fix whatever cataclysm they've caused, they have nicknamed this troper "Technogod."

In the past month alone, this troper has been through three Droid phones, one laptop (with a second narrowly saved only by a FACTORY RESET), had the electronic ignition on his car fail, and made the network at his parents' house unreliable just by coming home for the holidays. I'm thinking of becoming Amish.

For this troper, lots of things:

Windows installs are nearly self-destructing when he touches them. His Windows virtual machine (used only for MS Office and a few engineering programs he need for university) simply... decided to give up on its own.

Many applications will fail whenever he is in charge of doing any sysadmin, or when he needs to get work done. With error messages that, when Googled, give no results at all.

He can make a ''logic gate'' chip (which only works with low voltages and small loads) to overheat and fail, as he learned in a Digital Electronics class.

This Troper doesn't affect computers, but does affect cell phones and watches. Several of her watches have broken, including one which alternated between working and stopping within a few hours of its purchase. Additionally, she can't trust a cell phone's battery life (she's seen it go up without charging or go from four bars to zero in less than an hour), and has had assorted malfunctions with cell phone hardware requiring that she purchase four or five cell phones within the course of two years.

This Troper's father is this trope. Her sister's computer, which is at most about three months old, hasn't worked properly since he shut it down. If you try to turn it on, the monitor turns white, then a bunch of pretty pastel colors in stripes. Furthermore, the computers never work right after he "fixes" them,and this troper had to completely redo her sister's computer after he set it up because it kept overheating and shutting down for no reason. Even after all this, he still doesn't understand why we panic ever time we see him near our electronics. This troper believes her sister may have inherited a milder form of his techbane, because her electronics seem to be the most susceptible to malfunction after Dad uses them.

A friend of mine has this problem. She's savvy enough about general use, but when it comes to actual troubleshooting she often runs into weird problems that nobody has ever seen before.

In one place she worked, the copier worked for her, but after she used it, the thing wouldn't work for anyone else until after a technician came out to look at it. ''In the interim, it would still work for her!'' She was the only one that knew how to change out the toner cartridges (which was a fairly frequent occurrence)...

She has the WEIRDEST computer problems. Nearly every time, some update or malware caused her PC to go haywire. And it's almost always something I've never seen before. I built her computer... (The last two times, it was a software update that caused it to go bonkers. Removing the offending program is usually what it took, and almost every time it was something like a firewall or antivirus program.)

She can't wear a wristwatch. Brand new ones lasted less than a month before they stopped working, and secondhand timepieces that had worked for years died within a week.

(Same troper as above entry) A long time ago, Dad worked with someone that couldn't be trusted around any kind of magnetic storage media. Floppy disks and ''audio tapes'' would be unreadable after this guy had held them for more than a few minutes. Dude had computer problems all the time. The place went out of business long before optical storage media became common, so I have no idea if he had the same effect on CD-ROMs.

This Troper's brother while perfectly fine with his own computer was banished from his computer typing class, because computers broke around him. Once even catching fire. Or so he says

I used to think I was this, after I lost two laptops, their hard drives and two video cards in less than two years. But it turned out the problem was I was using second-hand stuff. Eventually my dad got me a new [=ThinkPad=], and it's lasted about as long as the two used ones combined despite more rough handling.

I'm usually pretty good with computers, but in Computer Science lab, I've got very used to [=TAs=] looking at me funny when I ask them for help with a computer or programming problem they've never heard of before, and then they go to look at it and can't figure it out. I don't break computers often, but when I do, they have the weirdest problems.

A more literal example, but to have a little fun, this troper put several signal jammers into his backpack and had them all on at once. everything within twenty feet of him was a dead zone for [=WiFi=], cell phone, radio, walkies, and a few other things. Needless to say he doesn't do this sort of thing much.

This troper, despite being fairly skilled with computer software, is known as Electromagnetic Field Girl due to her tendency to fry electronics, inability to wear a watch for longer than a few days, occasionally causing vending machines to spit out free drinks by standing next to them, frequently turning screwdrivers into electromagnets just by holding them, and once possibly melting a car engine (although that might have been some outside influence, because that would be less weird.)

This troper's (very old) computer finally died, so she bought a new one--which crashed after two months. Less than TWO WEEKS after that, her mp3 player also crashed. I've gone through four mp3 players in five years, and each time one dies it's some weird problem the tech support people have never even heard of. My husband calls me a female Harry Dresden, minus the whole awesome part.

This troper's sister makes him (the MrFixit) cry on a regular basis. In the year since she got a laptop, for instance, she has managed to screw up all antivirus security, install things that he swears are offshoots of 42.zip, taken the "Deleted Win32.exe" joke SERIOUSLY (even bypassing all the safeguards!), somehow managed to delete all user login information (thereby making it impossible to even fire up the OS), and regularly breaks CD players by ''touching them.'' Watches break, printers fail, cell phones blast static, all when within ten feet of this cyber-TyphoidMary.

This troper can operate a computer to some level of not-breaking-it-ness (though he definitely has his moments, particularly when dealing with anything that isn't Photoshop, Word, a browser, or a game), but it probably isn't a coincidence that most of his laptops have died well before their time. The one he's typing this on has had to have its screen replaced and refitted, the mouse doesn't work anymore, one of the USB ports is on-and-off, and the cord has wires showing. In his defense, it's less bad operation, and more an on-the-move lifestyle coupled with a failure to grasp that computers are not invincible.

Going on three years now, I have had to reinstall Windows every Christmas and deal with major spyware every April.

Mentioning this will probably screw me over, but I think I managed to avert this trope - next April's spyware infection came five months early, and I was able to fix it ''without'' reinstalling Windows. It probably helps that I decided that this year the majority of the Christmas money I got won't be spent on myself.

This troper is pretty tech-savvy overall, but since the dot matrix Okidata he used with his Commodore 128 started going bad around 1990 has ''never'' had a printer that worked right until getting a MacBook with Snow Leopard on it. (Gutenprint ftw...)

This troper has an issue with power cables, primarily. All other parts of the computer work no more oddly than for anyone else, but the power cables physically break much more for me than for anyone else. Even when I'm incredibly gentle with them. My father thinks I must be mistreating them, but I'm not...

This troper is this when he gets clumsy and collides with (the more fragile, expensive and hard to replace bits of) hardware, or when headphones are involved, going through several pairs a year. When upset, his mother can short circuit electronics simply by being in the room, though in the last few years this ability has waned.

This troper had a reputation for a "Murphonic field" back at high school. Over the course of the two years spent there before a transfer out of state, I used six computers. Three of them ceased to work. Two of them no longer could access the internet or any drives, internal or external. One of them was working when I left it . . . but was later reported to have shorted out. The next high school was no better. The first computer I used was permanently dead within a week (please note that this is five days after it was installed), and at a later date I managed to not only get a virus onto my USB flashdrive from the supposedly secure school network but to spread that virus to five other computers (not including my home computer) without realizing it, ''where the security system prevented them from being removed''. Eventually I purchased an antivirus for my home system, which worked up until the graphics card burnt out and caused a BSOD about four hours later, but the school computers had to be reinstalled from the OS up.

This troper is fairly good with computers - at least the software part of them. The hardware ''will'' break. My first PC had an unreliable hard drive that randomly "forgot" files (sometimes critical system files) and went through 3 CD drives and a failing CRT; also, a newly purchased 3D accelerator card ('97) was DOA and somehow the power supply blew up when I installed additional memory (in Soviet Belgium, you shock power supply dead). My second PC had a CD drive and separate CD writer, both of which died in the first month, followed by a broken power supply, another broken CD drive and then a broken video card fan. My third PC had a lingering hard drive problem caused by a bad cable connection; once fixed, it worked well for three years unless bumped and the cable wasn't reseated; then the (expensive) video card died. My fourth PC had the exact same cable connection problem and the DVD writer very quickly gave up the ghost, then the monitor rather ominously went dead for half an hour and a few days later I got a black screen and bios beep code while starting up, which miraculously fixed itself after a reset. Good thing I wised up the fourth time and set aside a few hundred euros for the inevitable repair costs. No, it's not dust or unstable power because other [=PCs=] used in the same house develop absolutely no problems.

This troper and her mother are on polar opposite sides of this trope. While her mother is incredibly tech-savvy (and apparently a miracle worker, having fixed a crashed airport computer by touching it), this Troper's track record with computers includes three fried hard drives, fifteen instances of spyware in three months and a tower that somehow caught fire while she was using it. The poles are switched when it comes to cars, however. Her mother has trashed several cars (her worst was when she decimated three minivans in one month), but this Troper managed to keep an Oldsmobile at its life's end (thanks to her mother) running by of all things patting the dashboard.

This troper breaks every computer, iPod, dvd player, etc she touches, and doesn't know how to turn on a TV at times. Justified in that she is also somewhat of a technophobe who never paid any attention whatsoever in IT.

This troper's mother is an inversion of this. She merely needs to go to the ''floor'' (you know, of the building) where the computer is malfunctioning, and suddenly it works!

Both I and my mother (and HER mother) have an effect on anything with an antenna - technology itself seems to work fine, but put any of us within 6 feet of an antenna (or 20 feet if we're antsy), and instant interference - crackling radios, fuzzy TV (well, analogue anyway), and so on. So far, only my mother has been able to suppress the effect (so that she can get within two feet. >> not much improvement) of the antenna before it starts fritzing out.

My non-troper friend makes lightbulbs explode when she gets angry or otherwise upset. She's never blown up a computer yet, but personally I think that's because she tends to leave the house when she's in that kind of mood.

This troper's mother sporadically causes this with machines - my father tells a story of where he set up a scanner, tested it, showed my mom how to use it, and with him in the room, she pressed the "Scan" button ''and did nothing else''... and the thing hasn't worked properly since. This troper somehow inherited the tech savvy of both parents - like my mother, machines sometimes fail for no obvious reason in my presence, but like my father, I know enough about computers to usually get them running again anyway.

Although this troper is decently computer-savvy, she tends to go through computers like loo paper, even ''without'' installing random crap on them - an acquaintance of hers is the same. This troper's dad is an inversion, having kept various machines running far beyond their time.

Someone in one of my university classes said that he has a tendency to cause electronics to stop working. As if to back it up, the professor's computer froze a few seconds later.

This troper definitely qualifies. Any piece of electronics she touches is bound to break, freeze, or spontaneously combust within a short period of time. Combine this with being a complete village idiot about anything involving computers, and you have a recipe for disaster...