[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/5yrs1...
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3227607-the-devouring-fu...
0. https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/27/us/janitor-alarm-freezer-rens...
1. http://www.st-v-sw.net/Obsidian/Martin/gravity.htm (search sprinkler)
The ice cream story reads too much like a dramatisation to be truly believable, but accidental and repeated unplugging is common I expect.
The UPS on a server I manage would trip once a week around the same time. The old story came to mind and sure enough, once a week it was time to vacuum and someone would plug in a vacuum cleaner into the same circuit (700W vacuum cleaner on a 100V/15A circuit), causing enough voltage dip to kick the UPS into gear.
But, the key thing is that urban legends always reflect some sort of underlying societal belief or worry. "Janitor polishes off patients" is about the fear of death, and how it can come for anyone at any time, and there's nothing they can do about it. "Janitor unplugs server every night at 5" is probably more about the idea that strange things happen sometimes, but it usually turns out that there's a good explanation.
Sorry but even before today, having a automotive engineer sent to a random person's home over what clearly sounds like a quack letter seems implausible to me. The dictates of capitalism, human resources, and the politics of the workplace would make this difficult if not impossible. Even in the past when there was more human capital in support positions and more of a sense of customer service.
Way, way too many suspicious stories involve high-level people being involved in trivial issues. I just find it all pretty suspicious. Real stories tend to start with poor customer service at the dealership and being mocked by managers and mechanics. Not some unrealistic ideal white knight manager sending off engineers to people's homes. Imagine how many weird letters a place like pontiac gets. They don't have the manpower to do this if they actually chose to do it, and engineers might balk at the idea of doing at-home support too.
Pretty much any "idealized Americana" business story should set off BS alarms in us. "Oh a trivial problem with your car? No problem ma'am, I'm sending our top engineers over tomorrow," doesn't happen because its costly and unsustainable. Instead ask anyone who has odd car problems. Its endless painful calls and visits to dealerships and mechanics. There's a reason we have lemon laws for cars. Its because whats described in this story doesn't actually happen and people demand restitution.
I don't doubt that someone had a famous vapor lock shopping story (ive heard different versions of this story, usually about a housewife picking up her child from a nearby elementary school), but over the years these stories get modified into memetic structures based on dishonesty because most people are social capital seeking and having a humorous story provides them the immature ego boost they need. So "wow my car had vapor lock when I make quick trips" became "So the CEO of Ford came to my house to look at my ice cream car..." The latter is just more interesting in the market of storytelling.
That is to say, the ONLY reason this story is here is because its been modified to be memeticly attractive. A "boring" (i find old technology faults interesting, personally), but a "boring" story about vapor lock wouldn't make it to places like HN or reddit, which are memetic responders (upvote/downvote mechanisms) and lowest-common denominator (by this demographic) popularity machines. But dress up that boring story and now everyone is repeating it, often times claiming its their story and they know the people in it! The same way the comment you're responding to probably doesn't actually know the famous "unplug the server at 5pm" person.
You're right -- it was obviously a fun engineering legend, and leave it at that.
Comedians make up stories all the time to entertain audiences. These stories don't require accuracy, they are more about delivering specific results; a laugh, a story to share, confirmation bias, etc.
Many people lie, believing they're telling the truth. I think you will have a hard time truth policing people who don't and won't care, but focusing on truth and validity is probably a useful skill for you in many parts of your life.
There is a lot of gradation, the differences between stating misinformation you believe is true vs stating what the majority believes to be true due to laziness vs an intentional lie, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_III#Design_flaws
And so it doesn't become apocryphal but stays a real story, there 100% were people who "Fixed" their RRoD Xbox 360s by wrapping them in towels for an hour so they cooked themselves even more, or they put the mobo in the oven on a low temperature. That fix was also 100% used for fixing certain graphics cards unseating in the mid 2000s as well.
So, in essence, "it depends". Good stories, in the memetic sense, will have hooks to ensure that the moral or point of the story is remembered; in a great story, the memetic hooks are so great that you can repeat the story nearly verbatim to other people, after hearing it yourself.
The vapor lock ice cream story might go back to this 1997 Car Talk Puzzler, where Ray claims it was a customer of his: https://cartalk.com/radio/puzzler/finicky-volare
I remember one incident where that "fix it" letter came from high enough that I drove out to the customer's house and swapped out their radio in their driveway. At night.
When GM bought EDS, Ross Perot ended up on the board. He'd do all sorts of silly things. Like when something went wrong with his car, he'd take it to a dealership. And report back to the board how that went. The first few times, they just told him to hand the keys to the valet at the executive garage and tell them what needs fixing. The plant I worked out of made radios. Other branches of the division that I worked for made engine computers and instrument clusters. If someone at the executive garage had a radio problem, one of my tasks was to go out to the assembly line, grab a radio, test it, then get it to the Kokomo airport for the GM jet to pick up. FedEx (tagline: when it positively has to be there the next day) wasn't fast enough. That fleet of jets would carry parts from plant to plant. And the executive garage was the best equipped and best staffed GM dealership on Earth.
It's staggering.
We were only selling equipment in the US at the time but some had found its way around the globe. This one particular Indian gentleman had been engaged for some time with support claiming that his unit wasn't working right and exhibiting all kinds of strange behavior.
I had a habit of looking at the cases with the longest open history, which is how I found it. I continued to monitor though I didn't send anyone out to India or anything like that.
Eventually it came out that the sleek looking aluminum unit had some kind of stocky packaging material stuck to it, so the customer had put it in the washer to clean it off.
Do not mistake cynicism for intelligence. It is actually negatively correlated [0, + other studies]
Just listing a basket of "I doubt..." and "No one does..." does not make it all false.
Of course Just So stories exist, but that does not mean that all cool stories are fabricated Just So stories. In this case, it is the cynicism that merits a [Citation Needed] tag.
[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/trust-games/202111/t...
One of the things I talk about is that these stories often ride the edge of plausibility. Even with this one, dispatching an engineer to someone's house over a "quack letter" seems like a thing that could happen or could have happened in the past. Having high level people involved is a thing that others have talked about, but I'd also like to point out that people have literally emailed jeff@amazon.com before about issues and gotten resolutions that way, so it's not completely off the mark.
The real clue here that we're dealing with an urban legend and not an actual incident (though it may be based on one) is the lack of specifics. Urban legends are often not really pinned down to any specific time or place.