12 year-old "Magneto Man"

Having taught computer usage to middle school students (for nearly 10 years), this story just had me laughing:

Like the movie "Be Kind Rewind," computers go haywire around Oswego County boy

I had students who had trouble with some of my lessons and who just couldn’t grasp editing or the use of a spreadsheet, but I never had one who could literally crash a computer while just sitting next to it. (There were a few who would do their best to intentionally cause a crash, however.)

Joe, a 12-year-old boy in the town of Richland in Oswego County, began calling himself "Magneto Man" last year, after his teachers concluded that his presence could crash the school computers.

"Another student could use a computer, and it would be fine. But if Joe was on it, weird things started to happen," said Marie Yerdon, computer lab teacher at Lura Sharp Elementary School in Pulaski.

The teacher speculates there is something in Joe’s body chemistry that’s causing the problem. Well, hell, a 12-year old boy’s body chemistry can be doing all sorts of strange things, if you know what I mean.

They finally had to put an anti-static pad under the computer and wrist strap on Joe to halt all the problems. (He also had difficulties playing an Xbox at home until they switched to a wireless Xbox 360 and put Joe across the room from the box.)

But the best part of the story is this:

But the most legendary example of Joe's "powers" came at his fifth-grade promotion ceremony last year, when the teachers put together a computer slide show of their students' baby pictures. The gym bleachers were packed with parents, and the students sat cross-legged on the floor to watch the presentation.

"They were going through the slide show, and my son was sitting quietly," Joe senior said. "And all of a sudden, the music started to slow down and get distorted, and the pictures were messing up, stuff like that. As parents, we didn't think anything of it, until two teachers sprinted over to get to Joe. We're thinking, 'What did he do? Did he do something wrong?'

"The teachers moved him away to the side of the room, and then the slide show started going again, and the computer went back up to speed," he said. "And then we realized that it wasn't that Joe was misbehaving. They were moving him away from the hard drive so the computer wouldn't crash."

He’s in the middle school now and his class is in a new wing. There have been no recurrences of the problems. Yet.

h/t to Ace