part0051

In modern folklore our present-day technology may substitute for the supernaturalism in myths from earlier epochs. As a result, we hear urban horror stories concerning microwave ovens, fast foods, and elevators rather than monsters, omens, or evil spells.

A case in point are the recent stories about now-familiar technological advances that have been introduced relatively recently. Already there is an emerging body of folklore about them.

For example, I’ve heard several times from bank personnel about a frustrated robber who they believe tried to hold up an automatic teller machine somewhere. (It was never the storyteller’s own bank.) The man allegedly wrote a note saying “Give me all your money, or I’ll shoot” and inserted the slip of paper into the bank’s ATM. When three such attempts gained him nothing, the man is said to have become so angry that he shot the machine full of holes, thus attracting the police, who arrested him.

I have also heard rumors—but never found verification—of a computer store that was unable to hook up a printer to one customer’s computer, whereupon the man became so irate that he shot and killed the salesman. In a variant of that story, the computer store keeps ordering the wrong cables for connecting the parts of the system, and the angry customer strangles a clerk with one of them. (Actually, I almost did that one time myself.)

A more old-fashioned technological legend concerns the proper way to load a dishwashing machine. Some people claim that you should never put knives and forks point up in the silverware basket because a woman who did it one time tripped and fell on an open dishwasher, impaling herself on the sharp points and dying as a result.

In a similar, and probably apocryphal, story that an electrician told me, three-prong grounded wall outlets are supposed to be very dangerous when installed in the usual way—with the two power openings on top and the single ground connector at the bottom. This electrician had heard several times about a nun being electrocuted when her rosary accidentally fell across the power points of a three-prong plug that was leaning slightly out of its wall mounting. Still, the electrician said, she had never heard of anyone actually mounting wall plugs “upside down” so as to avoid killing careless nuns.

My favorite technological legend of late was sent by a reader from Indiana. She heard about “someone’s inlaws somewhere” who started hearing a constant peeping sound coming from their basement. Unfortunately, as is usual in these situations, it was a weekend, and no exterminator would come out to check it until Monday. So the homeowners locked the basement door and taped it all around the edges to keep the mysterious creature inside. When the exterminator arrived, he broke the seal and fearfully shut and locked the door behind him as he descended the stairs in search of the dreaded pest. The exterminator, however, came quickly back upstairs and pounded on the door to get out. He had traced the peeping sound to technology, not varmints. “To solve your problem,” he reported, “you will just need to go down there and put new batteries in your smoke alarm.”

(After the above story appeared in a column, I heard from a reader in Milwaukee whose parents, living in Kansas, had indeed mistaken the chirping sound of their smoke detector for a cricket hiding in the house. This may indicate the actual origin of the apocryphal story, but it also makes me wonder if there are stories about telephones that “chirp” instead of ringing normally in the way that God, and Alexander Graham Bell, intended phones to do.)

Along the same technological lines are what I call “The Tales of Bungling Brides.” Although the stereotype of the inept newlywed woman is passé nowadays, some of the old stories still circulate among people who are presumably hearing them for the first time. One such story is represented in the following letter.

Have you heard about the bride who cut the bones out of the drumsticks before she baked the Thanksgiving turkey? Her husband asked her why she was doing so, but she didn’t really know. Puzzled, she called her mother, who had taught her to prepare a turkey this way .

This is a variation on an old standard bungling bride story. More often I used to hear that she is asked by her husband why she always cuts the end off a roast or a ham before putting it into the oven. As in your story, she merely was imitating her mother’s practice, not realizing that Mom had simply done it that way in order to make large cuts of meat fit into her small roasting pan .

Houses then always had screen doors, and more than one new husband was said to have been curious when he observed his bride fastening little balls of cotton to the screen doors with hair pins. He asked her why she did that .

“They keep flies out of the house,” she answered. But how, he wondered, could cotton balls on the screen have any effect on flies. His wife wasn’t really sure, so she called her mother who had taught her this wifely skill .

Very simple, Mom explained. She always used to stuff the cotton from pill bottles and the like into holes in the screen doors to plug them up after kids or collisions had damaged the screen. It really worked well to keep flies out of the house!