Frightening Technology!

[kingsrings]

Some friends of mine have a son who has a toy that terrifies me. If you leave it for awhile but don't turn it off, it starts calling out, "I'm still here!!" and things like that. Yikes! When I was a child, I had a Texas Instruments Speak and Spell that would become quite agitated and mean when the batteries were running low. You would be spelling out a word, and in the middle of spelling it, it would just start yelling out, "No! That's wrong!!" and stuff like that instead of the gentle corrections it usually spoke.

[melodrama]

You know how DVD's have menus at the beginning and the menu screen usually has music or noises?  Our weirdo DVD player, when you just stop the DVD and don't actually turn the player off, will revert to this menu screen after 30 minutes or so. 

One night a few years ago we had rented Butterfly Effect, watched it, then went to bed.  I woke up absolutely sick scared because there was this TERRIFYING NOISE coming from the living room.  It took a good 3 minutes of cold sweat terror before I figured out what it must be, and growled at my BF

"UNPLUG THAT *#$^&  DVD PLAYER!"

Apparently the menu screen for Butterfly Effect didn't have nice music, just very very disturbing scraping noises....took a few years off my life!

[HogwartsAlum]

One of the little girls I babysit has this doll that will start talking on its own.  It's really creepy and I make her keep it in her room because it reminds me too much of Chucky.  It doesn't look like him, but I don't like that it talks without anyone doing anything to it!

Eeeeeeeyaaaaa *shiver*....that made me think of that old Twilight Zone episode - "My name is Talky Tina and I think I could even hate you." 

I HATE TALKING DOLLS.

[SunkissableOne]

One of the little girls I babysit has this doll that will start talking on its own.  It's really creepy and I make her keep it in her room because it reminds me too much of Chucky.  It doesn't look like him, but I don't like that it talks without anyone doing anything to it!

Eeeeeeeyaaaaa *shiver*....that made me think of that old Twilight Zone episode - "My name is Talky Tina and I think I could even hate you." 

I HATE TALKING DOLLS.

Talking dolls are the devil.  I refuse to ever have them in my house.  They terrify me!

[Bethalize]

I had a Texas Instruments Speak and Spell that would become quite agitated and mean when the batteries were running low. You would be spelling out a word, and in the middle of spelling it, it would just start yelling out, "No! That's wrong!!" and stuff like that instead of the gentle corrections it usually spoke.

I still have a working Speak 'n' Maths. I credit it for my mental arithmatic skills. The American voice was quite hard to follow sometimes, especially in the "greater than, less than" game. It would say "Ten panths is greater or less than ten hundred panths"

It meant tenths.

[kingsrings]

I had a Texas Instruments Speak and Spell that would become quite agitated and mean when the batteries were running low. You would be spelling out a word, and in the middle of spelling it, it would just start yelling out, "No! That's wrong!!" and stuff like that instead of the gentle corrections it usually spoke.

I still have a working Speak 'n' Maths. I credit it for my mental arithmatic skills. The American voice was quite hard to follow sometimes, especially in the "greater than, less than" game. It would say "Ten panths is greater or less than ten hundred panths"

It meant tenths.

Ha, yeah now I do remember that the diction of Speak and Spell wasn't that great. After all, we are talking late 70's, early 80's technology at work. I remember one of the words was 'caravan', and the Speak and Spell pronounced it 'terror man'.

[Tabris]

A friend of mine was at work in her home office at about two o'clock in the morning. She kept the stash of kid toys stored in the home office.

Suddenly all the toys behind her started making their assorted noises. For no reason.

She shut off her computer, got up, and went to bed. No need to stick around for that.

[Sandi Papaya]

My mom has this thing for dolls. I can't quite explain it, she just has a fascination with them. I think it's because the years of the Cuban Revolution happened to fall during the years when a girl is more likely to play with dolls (she was 8 when Castro came to power, 10 or so when he allied himself with the USSR), so there weren't many dolls or toys of any description to be had post-Castro.

Anyway, she has this talking Ernie (from Sesame Street) doll that supposedly "sleeps" and such, and when it wakes up, it says, "I feel grrrreat!" I think it's supposed to do this at the flick of a switch or something, but every so often it will just say, "I feel grrrrrreat!" without any provocation - and keep repeating that phrase!

My mom and I are convinced it's possessed, but I can't convince her to get rid of it. Go figure. 

[Madd Hatter]

I just bought a new computer with new speakers and all.  No problems with it for a while, but then one day, the speakers started to squeal.  Could not figure out why.  I thought it was a game or something.  Finally figured it out.  If my brand new RAZR cell phone is within 10 feet of the computer, it'll send a signal that the speakers pick up and squeal!  Scares the heck out of me everytime, and the first time DS1 heard it through the headphones, I thought he was going to have a heartattack!  lol  Now I make sure to either turn the phone off or put it in my room!

[Sandi Papaya]

I just bought a new computer with new speakers and all.  No problems with it for a while, but then one day, the speakers started to squeal.  Could not figure out why.  I thought it was a game or something.  Finally figured it out.  If my brand new RAZR cell phone is within 10 feet of the computer, it'll send a signal that the speakers pick up and squeal!  Scares the heck out of me everytime, and the first time DS1 heard it through the headphones, I thought he was going to have a heartattack!  lol  Now I make sure to either turn the phone off or put it in my room!

This doesn't only happen with brand-new cellphones, it happens quite a bit with cellphones in general if they're in a vicinity of a computer. It's always a PC, though, because my cellphone (a Nokia 61somethingorother, I forget) always made my old computer at work act up if it was in the vicinity of the computer and someone happened to call or text-message me at work - I often knew I was getting a call or a text by the way the computer monitor "shivered" just before the call or text came through. My Mac at home is fine whenever the cellphone rings.

[Xanthia, Maker of fine Tin-foil hats since 2007]

The ceiling fan in our Master Bedroom has a remote control to turn the fan and lights on/off.  A few weeks after we first moved in, the lights would tun on in the middle of the night for NO REASON, and the remote was on the night stand.  THis kept happening at about the same time in the morning, waking Jellybean and I out of a sound sleep.  It was creapy, especially when I would find the remote, turn it off and it came back on again.

Come to find out, the guy next door had one of those nifty remotes as well and also a garage door opener (do NOT ask me how) sometimes when he used his remote/garage door opener (we are not sure which one was triggering our lights, and he worked an early am shift) it triggered our lights, and we live in cement block houses with several yard between out homes.  Jellybean switched the "channel" on it and it has not happened since.

It was FREAKY when it was happening though.

[shadowfox79]

When I lived in a student hall, my bedroom had the worst electrics known to man.

You would be sitting there quite happily and all the lights would go out. There were three separate lights in my room - the main light, the wall light and the one over the mirror. It would then become a game of the Crystal Maze as I would flip the switch for the wall light and the mirror light would come on, and so forth.

I requested an electrician. He listened as I explained with this smirk on his face as if to say "Yeah, right, dumb student, thinks I'll believe anything." He then reached over to switch the wall light on and off and was rather surprised to see the mirror light flashing at the same time. Yes, they were all connected.

When he unscrewed the wall switch the wires literally fell out. I shudder to think what could have happened if I'd touched it at the wrong time. It took him an hour to figure out what was going on and fix it.

[kethria]

We had moved into a rental house like 4 years ago, for a year, and the day we moved in I was convinced the house was trying to give me a heart attack... First my radio went off, even though it was unplugged, the battery backup was good, so the alarm went off at 5 am, then that night, I woke up to a woman's voice talking in our hallway. Nearly had a heart attack. Turns out they had carbon monoxide detectors that TALKED.

It was saying "Hello, your batteries are low, please change them.." at 15 minute intervals..

Argh!

[Rei-chan]

This is not so much with the creepy, but did anyone hear about the talking Nev bear in Britain that screamed an obscenity instead of what it was supposed to say?  This happened around December I think.

From what I can remember, it seemed that a programmer thought it would be funny to make it say this instead of its normal script, and changed the programming.  I wonder how many surprises people got on Christmas morning when the kids opened THAT one!

Though, I guess it would be kinda creepy to have a kid's show doll yelling obscenities at me when I activated it.

About 6 years ago, I worked for Suncoast (movie store) and in our kid's section we had these Winnie the Pooh toys that moved their heads and waved their arms when they talked.  People had been activating them all day (they were motion sensored I think), and I guess the batteries were low (at least, I keep telling myself that).  Around closing time, I went to straighten that area, and all 30 of them turned their heads in my direction at the same time and just "looked at me".  No talking, no arm waving, just LOOKED. 

I wouldn't go back over there after that....

[Madd Hatter]

This doesn't only happen with brand-new cellphones, it happens quite a bit with cellphones in general if they're in a vicinity of a computer. It's always a PC, though, because my cellphone (a Nokia 61somethingorother, I forget) always made my old computer at work act up if it was in the vicinity of the computer and someone happened to call or text-message me at work - I often knew I was getting a call or a text by the way the computer monitor "shivered" just before the call or text came through. My Mac at home is fine whenever the cellphone rings.
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Thank you MsMoonbunny.  I'm glad I'm not the only one this has happened too.  Now I know I'm not loosing my mind!  lol