Hard drive in the freezer. Broken actuator. Well, I put the entire laptop in. Early 00s probably. Worked for like 3 minutes.

Told a janitor to not unplug the equipment rack in a closet to plug in their vacuum cleaner. Why they thought that plugging in their vacuum there, rather than just using the outlet not 6 feet away outside the closet is beyond me.

Further, why that closet wasn’t locked in the first place. But this was almost 30 years ago and it was another time in IT.

I spoke with the janitor and she started plugging in her vacuum in the adjacent outlet. Then I went to the director of IT and got the capitol cost approved to secure all of the networking closets in the building, which there were 6, one for each floor. Only the one floor was an issue as that closet also house a sink and drain for the janitors to use. There wasn’t another place we could move the networking equipment to without laying out a lot of money.

I have two… these are from the old days of computing :)

One: guy said his monitor was showing wavy lines on the screen (old CRT monitor days). Went to his office, looked at his monitor. Sure enough wavy lines. Looked the top of his monitor. Removed the clock sitting on top of said monitor, no more wavy lines. Don’t put electric clocks on CRT monitors folks.

Two: working in a school system. Just before classes started. Get a call “none of the computers turn on”. Go to the classroom. Check a few machines. Machines “turned on” but didn’t boot the OS. Listen to one of the machines… hmmm, no drive noise. Tap it with the back of a screwdriver. Drive spins up, computer boots. Later found out that it was a semi-known problem with Seagate drives. If they sat to long without use, the heads would get stuck.

I stabbed a router with a knife twice and it worked. It knew I wasn’t fucking around now.

Easy.

When I was 13, we had an Apple IIc. My mother used to take the cable that connected the computer and the monitor to work with her so I’d focus on homework rather than playing Ultima IV.

But it was a monochrome signal. I straightened out a metal coat hanger and plugged it in… it worked just fine if you didn’t bump it.

Coworker’s story: Trying to fix a prototype in a hotel room at a European trade show. Soldering iron on hand, but it was a 120V iron and glowed white hot when plugged into a 240V outlet.

So they had one person solder and the other person keep unplugging and replugging the iron from the wall at roughly 50% duty cycle.

Dead PC.

Unplug PC.

Lick finger.

Stick finger against 3 metal bits where cord goes on power supply.

Plug in PC.

PC works.

Opened and revived a DOA GameGear by cleaning off the furry, green, PCB corrosion. Didn’t have any Isopropyl around, so I used vodka.

Needed to get a server back online when it’s CPU cooler had failed

Found some random cooler for a totally different CPU, smeared thermal paste on it and zip-tied the cooler to the mobo and case as best I could.

That thing ran like a champ for almost 6 months till I got around to replacing it

Turned it off … and then turned it back on again. It feels stupid, but it fixes way more issues than it should.

Originally posted here, quoted below for convenience:

Real story.

I was in my late teens. My parents were dragging me to a tiny, kinda culty church every fuckin’ weekend. Didn’t really have much choice. (Hell, I hadn’t even told anyone yet that I thought Christianity was 100% bullshit.)

I had a reputation for knowing my stuff about computers. (Because normies – particularly boomer normies like Pastor Dipshit – don’t know the difference between programmers and PC support.)

So, one Sunday after the service, Pastor Dipshit asks me to look at his computer. His Outlook was giving an error dialog. Something about not being able to find an email on disk. Clicking the “ok” button just resulted immediately in another dialog, and while the error dialog was present you couldn’t interact with the main window, so this rendered Outlook unusable.

Turns out he’d gone and deleted a bunch of files from the filesystem. Like by navigating from “My Computer” down to the directory where Outlook stored its files. Rather than deleting emails through the Outlook GUI the way one is meant to.

So, I mused “hmm, I wonder if it’s just giving one error message per email that was affected.” I could see in the window behind the error dialog that the total count of emails in his inbox was only a couple hundred or something.

So I commenced to clicking as rapidly as I could. Probably about a minute of clicking later, no more error dialogs and Outlook was usable again.

And everyone marveled at my “genius.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t learn his lesson and continued to delete random files from the filesystem, but he kindof lost what was left of his connection to consensus reality and scared even my culty family away and we quit attending that church not terribly long after that, so I couldn’t say for sure.

Friend’s desktop was so fried from Kazaa and Limewire, that he couldn’t even open a Windows explorer window. Ended up opening Notepad and copying all of his files to a thumbdrive using the file open dialog box before reformatting.

I had a router that I converted to a access point with openwrt, couldn’t get vlan trunking to work, so I ran 3 separate network cables back to the switch and assigned each one to its own WiFi network

Ran a hairdryer all night, propped against my Mac laptop keyboard after a friend knocked over a full pint of beer onto it.

The next morning the whole bathroom reeked of stale beer, the power bill was astronomical, and the left quarter of the keyboard never worked again.

Took it in for repairs and was grateful AppleCare swapped it out without a peep. This was a while back, before the embedded moisture strips that void the warranty.

I once had to tell a colleague that her breasts were pressing the space bar when she put an invoice in her processed tray. I don’t know about dumb but it was embarrassing.