If Hackworth had been doing this at work, he would already be finished, 
but Dr. X's system was a sort of Polish democracy requiring full consent of 
all participants, elicited one subsystem at a time. Dr. X and his assistants 
would gather around whichever subsystem was believed to be farthest out of line 
and shout at each other in a mixture of Shanghainese, Mandarin, and technical 
English for a while. Therapies administered included but were not limited to: 
turning things off, then on again; picking them up a couple of inches and then 
dropping them; turning off nonessential appliances in this and other rooms; 
removing lids and
wiggling circuit boards; extracting small contaminants, such as insects and 
their egg cases, with nonconducting chopsticks; cable-wiggling; 
incense-burning; putting folded-up pieces of paper beneath table legs; drinking 
tea and sulking; invoking unseen powers; sending runners to other rooms, 
buildings, or precincts with exquisitely calligraphed notes and waiting for 
them to come back carrying spare parts in dusty, yellowed cardboard boxes; and 
a similarly diverse suite of troubleshooting techniques in the
realm of software. Much of this performance seemed to be genuine, the rest 
merely for Hackworth's consumption, presumably laying the groundwork for a 
renegotiation of the deal.