The placebo lies you've been living, and you had no idea. I worked at a kid's birthday party place for a couple of years in high school. So many kids cry because they've fallen over or bumped their arm and stuff, never anything too serious. If you said something like, can you shake your foot around? Does it feel better? How about jumping in a circle? All right, we're going to blow on your hand so it feels better, and then you'd ask if

they were ready to play again, it generally worked like a charm.

Also bandages for tiny little boo-boos.

They think they're healed and they get right back to being happy little kids.

Your perception of bad luck is basically placebo.

The human brain is predisposed to remember bad experiences more

vividly than the good ones. Thus, for an example, you might say your luck was always awful at

tolls, when in reality you only get stuck in traffic 20 to 50% at the time. So I'm sure this has

happened to other people, but this question just reminded me of my principal.

During meetings and such, he used the school auditorium, and most of the time I, a senior now at school, had to run the sound and lights. He was extremely annoying about it and would always ask for his mic to be turned up, when, in reality, he's already extremely loud and it will bust the speakers. I just pretend to turn it up and ask him if it's good, and he speaks and says,

Oh, that's perfect, thank you.

I swear he... already extremely loud and it will bust the speakers. I just pretend to turn it up and ask him if it's

good, and he speaks and says, oh, that's perfect, thank you. I swear he thinks I'm doing an amazing

job. It had bring me a Coke or something for dealing with the meetings half the day. Greatest

placebo to use against others that I've done. When I worked and trained in tech support, our agents

would always get pushback from customers when we asked them to power cycle their phone, which still, nine times out of ten would fix the issue. So I had them tell the customer to read them some numbers off the back of the battery. This was back when batteries were still removable. We absolutely didn't need the number. At the end of them reading it, we'd tell them that we refreshed a few systems, and then they put their battery back in, the phone restarted and, hey, presto, it was all fixed. Alternatively, when batteries couldn't be removed, we'd tell them that if the phone was powered on while we did the update, it could ruin their SIM card, so they'd make sure to power off their phone. To do nothing, they'd turn it back on, and it worked great.

We jumped through all of these hoops because if you tell a customer just to turn their phone off and on again,

they get real offended and ask if you think they're stupid.

I absolutely love this story because it's so true.

Just two days ago, I told a client to close his web browser and reopen it to fix an issue on our page.

He'd complained of it seemingly being slow today, despite videos from several team members

demonstrating it wasn't. He closed and reopened, and voila, it was fixed. He'd had the browser

...