The bird burst through the windscreen, broke the engineer's chair, and made a dent in the back wall of the engine cab. But this damage, it transpired, proved nothing because the British had not read the instructions closely enough. 'Next time, thaw the chicken,' came an advisory from (of all people) the United States Federal Aviation Authority.
In a variation on the story, an examination of high-speed video footage showing a flying poultry projectile reveals an involuntary hitch-hiker: a hungry, startled-looking stray cat clinging to a half-eaten chicken as it exits the barrel at Mach 0.7. Unfortunately, an intensive research effort by Technopedia has failed to find this image, or indeed any evidence that either event actually occurred.
Either way, the dead chicken you are likely to encounter in the technology arena will not be flying, but waving in the grip of a know-it-all technician - figuratively speaking. In the digital dictionary the phrase, 'wave a dead chicken' means to perform a voodoo-style ritual in the direction of crashed software or hardware that is likely to accomplish nothing except satisfy the ignorant natives that the appropriate degree of effort has been expended.
Computer frozen, cursor apparently nailed to the screen? Call technical support and watch in awe as they perform the chicken-waving ritual.
Printer coughing and convulsing like a chain-smoking octogenarian? It is time for the nerd with the bird.
The usual dead-chicken procedure takes the form of that spectacularly reassuring and pointless gesture, the virus scan. Ignore the rash of scare stories whipped up by technology writers desperate to talk about something more interesting than the latest version of the Winsux operating system. Viruses are not queuing up to annihilate your hard drive. Nor are they already lurking inside your computer ready to jump out and frazzle your motherboard the next time you type the word 'the'.
