I am suffering from the 'Pauli Effect'...or rather, I am making everything around me suffer from it.

Wolfgang Pauli, the famous physicist, was also (in)famous for exercising a bizarre effect especially on mechanical objects and equipment around him. A pure theoretician to the core, he was purported to cause such equipment to malfunction by his sheer presence. For unexplained reasons. when Pauli entered the room, sparks would fly and circuits would short, motors would fall down with a crash, and acids and bases would spill on the floor. According to the physicist James Frank (a Nobel Prize winning experimentalist), even when Pauli would fly overhead in an aircraft, such manifestations would become instantly visible...

Insidious as the Pauli Effect is, I had no idea that it would be passed down over three generations to me of all the people, an innocent lad who has only the highest respect for experimentalists and experiments. With devastating speed, the effect has manifested itself through me, and its first victims are three unfortunate Macs, neatly of three different sizes (12'...sorry...12", 15" and 17") whose hard disks crashed, all in an interval of less than a month, after I started using them. Other star-wars style special effects also became visible in their workings, when I wisely dispatched them to the Apple shop. One of them was my 'brand new' Powerbook. If this is coincidence, then it is the most cruel of destiny's manifestations. I hope the Pauli Effect goes away soon. If I had been assured that I too would win the Nobel Prize, then I would have gladly even smashed electronic equipment around me of my own volition...quite gladly. But the Pauli Effect SANS the ability and the achievement..now THAT'S a real tragedy. Dear Wolfgang...pray let go; I am sure you will find much more worthy successors who can bring your cherished and exalted legend to life again...