My Electric Grandma

My mother and grandma both possess this astrological ESP like ability, I suppose mild and untuned, but often accurate and completely dumbfounding. I refer to it as “witchy-poo”. When my Gran died a few months ago, I predicted that she would become even more powerful in death (like Obi-Wan). How right I was…

It all started when Dad was over at my place and we were burning music CDs for Gran’s funeral. I still had a selection of songs from George’s funeral and Dad wanted to use some of them for Gran’s CD.

We had selected all the songs and I put in a CD and burned the first copy. When I went to get the copy, the CD drive would not eject. The case button can be a bit finicky at times, so I tried many, many times. Getting nowhere, I restarted the computer and tried again – but it was still dead. I used the manual eject (you know, that little pin-hole) to get the CD out and put in a new CD. The CD tray had no power and it would not read. I assumed the power cable to the CD drive had become dislodged inside the computer, or that the motor had bit the dust.

I told Dad that I would get it sorted and that I would drop the CDs off to him when I saw him next.

That night while I was sleeping, I had a dream that I woke up in the morning, turned on my PC and tried the CD drive again. It ejected no worries, and appeared to be working completely fine.

The next morning when I did actually wake up, I remembered this dream and went immediately out to the study to try the drive. And guess what? It ejected no worries and worked completely fine. I sent a message to Dad, commenting that Gran maybe didn’t want “Danny Boy” on her funeral music CD. I got a call back five minutes later from Dad and he had another story for me:

Apparently Mum, her partner Johnny and Pop were sitting around the kitchen table at Gran and Pop’s house organising things for the funeral when the power suddenly went out. Everyone was sitting around the table in darkness. Uncle Steve then walked back into the room, looked upward, raised a fist to the sky and exclaimed “Coral!”. No more than a second after doing so, the power returned and the lights came back on. No one doubted that it was the work of Gran.

On the day of the funeral, “Danny Boy” was playing as the coffin was being lowered into the ground. It got about 1/3 of the way down, then refused to go any further. The funeral directors had to come over and get it all going again. From the side of the crowd I muttered “Sorry Gran…” and thought “I wish I knew what song you actually wanted!”

There have been all kinds of unusual things happening since – always electrical.

One notably, about two months later: I was having a party at our house, which included a racing gaming tournament played on two separate Playstations – one mine, in moderate condition, and one Jason’s, well used but in immaculate condition. We ran the races side-by-side on two TVs.

At one point during the night both of the PlayStations were refusing to load at the same time. We tried cleaning the discs and resetting the units multiple times, but they were still refusing to load up the tracks. This type of unexplainable failure was becoming all too common. For my PlayStation I went and burned another backup copy of the game. I put in the fresh CD and said “C’mon Gran, just let us play!”. The fresh CD appeared to work and the other PlayStation began working again with it.

I’m a scientific thinker and would ordinarily dismiss most this stuff, putting it down to coincidence, but it has all been way too strange and concentrated, like nothing I’ve seen before.

If anyone could fiddle with this stuff, it would be Gran. But if you just acknowledge that she is there, then she’ll probably let you go on your way.