One of my father's favorite stories involves debugging an intermittent error, wading through all of the spec's until finally isolating it to a single subsystem.

One of my father's favorite stories involves debugging an intermittent error, wading through all of the spec's until finally isolating it to a single subsystem. He pointed to and pressed on the IC package, and apparently reseated it. The problem never recurred. Also, the often noted "magic switch": http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html