The Jargon File refers to situations like this as dancing frogs after Michigan J. Frog's behaviour in his first appearance.

As a person who has been in that exact scenario a few times, that's a great name for it

EDIT:typo

In Germany we call this the "Vorführeffekt" (literally "demonstration effect", not related to what it apparently means in English). It's actually a pretty common word here.

In code/design/science, there's a debugging methodology called "rubberducking" that operates on precisely this principle.

When it fails, your only hope is the ephemeral Ballmer Peak

yer..

i know that one to well...
friggn technology

I always call this a part of my belief of the chaos principal which includes, when you're trying to talk about something but you forget what it is when it's your turn to speak, the looking for something and never be able to find it when you want it but as soon as you stop looking then you find it, the more you try and keep something tidy the more it gets filthy, and deja Vu also falls under this occasionally in my belief.

bork7 said:
In code/design/science, there's a debugging methodology called "rubberducking" that operates on precisely this principle.

Rubberducking is when you explain something to someone and in the process you make a mental connection which makes you realize what the solution to whatever problem you have is, with no actual input from the other party (so a literal rubber duck is good enough consultation partner, hence the name). You had a problem but now you know what to do about it. This is something different. "Hey, could you come over here and have a look? I'm pressing the power button but the TV doesn't turn on. See? [press] ...it turned on this time" or "look, if I do this sequence of steps that causes a bug in the program aaaaaaand no, no bug this time, of course". It's an "...oh yeah, right, thanks!" vs "...welp, I don't get it, sorry for wasting your time".

That last bit of makes me wonder though if the phenomenon of looking for something where it should be and being unable to find it, and then it just turning out to be RIGHT THERE when you ask for help qualifies.

Oh, you mean a heisenbug? This is an unusual software bug that disappears or alters its behavior when an attempt to isolate it is made. Due to the unpredictable nature of a heisenbug, when trying to recreate the bug or using a debugger, the error may change or even vanish on a retry. The name heisenbug is derived from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle which states, “it is fundamentally impossible to predict the position and momentum of a particle at the same time”.

Contrast with bohrbug.

Thus the old saying, "A watched pot never boils."