Chances are, if you live long enough, you too will see things that you were once convinced were absolutely true, ultimately proven false.

If you look through the annals of history, the development of fields like science and medicine have never really been a straight line. It's often a complicated process of taking a belief, putting it through rigorous testing, compiling your results, and trying again until you've figured something out (and that's just for starters).

I mean, historically speaking, it wasn't that long ago that people believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth, or that the Earth is flat (which is to say nothing of the people who still believe these things to be true). However, while we've yet to unlock all the secrets of the universe, quite a few things that were once attributed to forces like magic, fate, the gods, or spirits have been proved to have a perfectly reasonable scientific explanation.

This of course makes it all the harder to believe it when people who still believe in these old forces insist that they are present and functional in our modern lives.

As such, it must have been VERY surprising for Sally Le Page, a biologist from Stratford-upon-Avon, UK, to discover that her local water company still looks for leaks wit a form of "magic..."

Le Page called her local water company to report a leak in her parents' water system, and was very shocked when, upon arriving at their house, the technician took out what she described as two "bent tent pegs" and attempted to use them to find a main pipe.

The pegs are known as "divining rods," are are part of an ancient superstition where people attempted to use them to channel the forces of the Earth and locate things that had become lost to them (on in rural areas, to find water). While a reasonably well-known tradition, there has never been any conclusive evidence to say that divining rods work, and they are often chalked up to being a hoax.

Le Page said: "I can't state this enough: there is no scientifically rigorous, doubly blind evidence that divining rods work. Isn't it a bit silly that big companies are still using magic to do their jobs?" The water company, Severn Trent, responded by saying: "We don't issue divining rods but we believe some of our engineers use them."

In fact, Le Page contact several other water companies in the area, several of whom confirmed that they had technicians that still used divining rods to find leaks.

What do you think? Is it weird that professional companies are trying to use divining rods in their line of work?