The Pauli Effect

Wolfgang Pauli was an Austrian theoretical physicist. He was a close friend of Carl Jung. He was a believer in synchronicity.

He was also the namesake of the "Pauli effect".

What is the Pauli effect?

Well, Pauli had the strange ability to make devices stop working. He became known as a serious jinx when in the room during any experiment. Devices would break, things would fall over, experiments would fail...

Even a close friend banned him from coming anywhere in the vicinity when an experiment was going on.

The Pauli effect...

Also know as the "Sorak effect".

See, the Sorak family seems to have a curse. Things fall apart whenever we are around. Or simple things go bad.

Just ask my father. Or my brother. Or consult any vehicle we have ever known.

A perfect example: The first car I owned at age 16 was bought from one of my dad's work friend's son. He had owned it for a while - it ran perfectly. I went over there to test drive it - ran perfect. Drove it home after purchasing it - ran perfect.

The next morning, I tried to start it.

Wouldn't start.

Proceeded not to start for the remainder of my ownership.

Things like this happen all the time.

My car in Illinois is a wonderful ghetto-rigged machine. The hood is tied down, I have a plastic figure wedged in the dashboard to prevent rattling, I have wedged anything from hygiene bags to peanut butter jars between the seat and the stick shift to prevent the rattling, my dashboard lights don't work, the emergency brake has repeatedly failed since the warranty expired, and my rear sway bar is currently tied up to the underside of my car after failing in a thunderstorm during the middle of the night on my way back from San Francisco.

Or ask my brother's Corvette that has been out of commission in my parent's garage for longer than he was able to drive it...

Or my father's car, constantly under repair...

It doesn't end there. It includes electronics. Or anything with moving parts. We are just bad luck.

Which brings me to Jenny's car.

First, about a month ago, we were visiting her friend Lena in Örebro. Everyone was planning to go to this outdoor concert and I was going to drive. It was remarkably hot that day and the car was like an oven.

As soon as I opened the car, I put in the key and rolled down all four windows. We all hopped in, I started the car, and we tried to roll up the windows a bit.

Click.

The driver side rear window wouldn't roll up.

It was stuck down in the door.

This resulted in an adventure for Jenny and I for the remainder of the evening. We purchased a toolkit, tried to get the door open, and, upon failure, I attempted to think of every MacGuyver way to get that sucker back up again.

Her window has been taped over with black plastic since that day. We still haven't fixed it.

Oops.

Last week, we were cooking dinner and realized we needed something else from the store. I volunteered to drive there and took off. There is a dirt and gravel road connecting Jenny's road to a main road and I was driving down this, twisting and turning. Suddenly, another car was coming. The road isn't wide enough for two cars, so I drove halfway on the road and halfway on the grass.

Not realizing it, I hit something.

(Un)luckily, the other car happened to be Jenny's parents.

Who happened to think I was driving crazy (in my defense, I wasn't... I'm a bit terrified of these Swedish roads and drive quite slow...)

And who said I hit a rock.

We didn't discuss the matter and everything seemed fine.

But Jenny's mom called the next day when we were in Norrköping at Jenny's school, three hours north. There was a bunch of oil in the driveway.

After a quick inspection, sure enough, I had cracked the oil pan.

It was Saturday and car shops wouldn't be open until Monday.

We proceeded to continually refill the oil for the next five days while trying to figure out what to do... polluting the Earth in the meantime. Through a series of emails with my father, he suggested everything from filling the crack with bar soap to supergluing a piece of aluminum over it to JB Weld to bubblegum.

In the end, I paid a shop to put on a new oil pan.

Total cost?

3,100 SEK.

I'll leave the conversion to you if you're interested in figuring out how much that is in dollars.

Oops.

I'm awesome.