[davimack]

Not mine, but one I ran into. This is on an automated testing rig for microwave devices, which are odd things - you don't have wires for microwaves, you have wave guides, which are basically tubes which you can pipe the microwave through, and which are incredibly fiddly to get situated properly. So, to test one of these things, you're likely to get a failure and not have any discernible reason for it failing - you'll tear it down and not find any problems, put it back together and it'll work just fine.

Well, the engineer writing the test code knew these devices were odd, and that sometimes they'd just fail. So, s/he put in an if block to the effect that, "if this fails once, run the test 30 times and, if it passes 25/30 times, call it a pass." So, every now and again, the entire automated testing line comes to a halt and sits there for 31x the amount of time it should take, and it's not a short test (maybe sat there 30 minutes each iteration).