Things We Fixed by Blowing on Them

There was one tech support move, and every kid knew it.

The game wouldn't load. The screen was a mess of colored stripes, or just a blinking gray nothing. So you pulled the cartridge out, held it up to your face and blew into the bottom like you were putting out birthday candles. Then you put it back in, pushed it down, crossed your fingers and hit power.

Sometimes it worked. That was enough to make it law.

The rituals

Everybody had their own version:

• Blow on it once, firmly.
• Blow on it three times, side to side, like a harmonica.
• Blow on the console too, for balance.
• Push the cartridge in, then push it down with exactly the right amount of pressure. Not too much.
• Wedge a second game on top of the cartridge to hold it in place. A science.

Did it actually work?

Mostly no. Here's the honest version.

The problem usually wasn't dust. It was a bad connection between the cartridge and the pins inside the console. Taking the cartridge out and putting it back in reseated it, and sometimes that was enough. The blowing was the part we gave credit to, because it felt like doing something.

Worse, blowing on the contacts put moisture on them, and over time that could make the connection worse. The official advice was not to do it at all. Nobody listened.

Why it stuck

We didn't have a help desk. We didn't have a search engine. We had a broken thing, a living room and whatever the kid down the street said worked. So we tried stuff until something did.

That's not a bad way to learn. It's how half of us ended up fixing computers for our entire families, and why we still unplug the router, count to ten and plug it back in before calling anybody.

Blow on the cartridge below. See how many tries it takes.