It's Overloading the Machine as in, the washing machine, primarily. The name comes from the laundromat next door. They have very large signs on each machine which say, in all-caps, "DO NOT OVERLOAD THE MACHINE". All in all, there are at least twenty of these signs posted.
Both at the laundromat and at home, I regularly overload the machine, leading to unpredictable results.
So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s
dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on
the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on
the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web
anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or
in restaurants.
-- Douglas Adams
This page was last modified on 2011 December 20.