What’s a Random Wire Technology?
When I was going to college at WPI I joined the amateur radio club. One event that we held to promote ourselves was a mini “fox hunt”. This is a where you use a radio with a directional antenna to try and find a hidden transmitter.
To prepare for this we were wiring up radio circuits on bread boards and after 10 had been built, we started testing them to find that none worked. Several of us started checking the circuit against the schematic and probing to try and find the problem. In an attempt to probe a part of the circuit I stuck a random wire into the breadboard and found that the circuit came to life on it’s own.
I then shared this with someone else who thought about what had happened and said “Let me use your random wire technology and see if can find the real solution”. Both because I was the one that had found the source of the problem, albeit mostly through serendipity, and just that odd phrasing, that line always stuck with me.