Tried to fix a 1980s boombox with a butter knife and a prayer, and it started playing polka music from a station that doesn't exist.

I was trying to free a stuck tape deck mechanism in my garage last week, and after a little nudge with the knife, the radio lit up and only played accordion music for a solid hour before it died for good, so has anyone else had a repair attempt unlock a device's weird hidden feature?

3 comments

3 Comments

matthew_hart2524d agoTop Commenter

Okay, that's actually kind of amazing. I mean, you didn't fix it, you just unlocked its final ghost feature. It's like the boombox had one last weird memory to share before it went. My old TV would only get static, but if you hit the side just right, you'd get like two minutes of a Spanish soap opera from a channel we never had. Old electronics are just haunted, I guess.

harper_carter8124d ago

That "hit the side just right" thing is so real. My buddy had a car radio that only picked up one station, some old timey gospel hour. But if you went over railroad tracks too fast, it would glitch and play like 30 seconds of a 90s rap song, then go back. We drove over those tracks for weeks trying to figure out where it was coming from. Never did.

jennifershah19d ago

Actually, that sounds more like a dying capacitor or a loose wire picking up stray signals. Old electronics can get weird when parts start to fail, not because they're haunted. My dad's old radio would pick up a taxi dispatch channel when the soldering on the antenna connection went bad.