I heard a similar story. Back in the day, when computers were big and slow, there was a debugging room in the Bell Labs. When a programmer had difficulties debugging his piece of code, he went to that room and talk to a teddy bear about his code and the error he's getting. This should have made him realize what he's doing wrong. I don't know how successful the method was for them, however it works often for me.
"One university computer center kept a teddy bear near the help desk. Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain them to the bear before they could speak to a human counsellor." - The Practice of Programming, Kernighan and Pike 1999.
It's a good book and a good technique. We used to use the director for the same purpose at my first "real" job. He couldn't program but he was really good at looking skeptical.
