Asklemmy

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.

I wanted to install an extra hard drive in my computer, but the power supply didn't have enough connectors. I actually had a spare power supply unit, but upon testing, the 24 pin cable was too short to reach the motherboard.

I ended up using both PSUs. Only one had a power switch on it, so that was connected to the hard drives. I had to use a paperclip in the unused 24 pin connector to make it output power. The 2 PSUs had a wire running between the ground pins of a random unused connector, and they were on the same phase circuit.

The hard drive PSU had to be turned on first at the switch. Once that was on, I could press the power button to turn on the computer. I think I used it for about a year before buying enough upgrade parts to effectively replace the entire computer.

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

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 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.

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

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.

Removed the plastic film on a brand new phone when someone complained that the earpiece sounded bad during calls

chmod -R 777 *

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Told someone to take their headset off their keyboard when help application kept appearing on their screen.

Individually press all the Shift, Alt and Ctrl keys.

This was back in the Windows 95 days and persisted for quite a few versions. The symptoms were that when typing you'd get accented or no characters, basically Windows thought one of the keys was held down. It happened more often than you'd think.

I was working on a e-commerce site for a large furniture manufacturer. They wanted to add a new attribute to a site that dealt with the fabrics they used. This would have been somewhere near 500 individual products with their own value for this attribute. We had to get this lined up on the product csv because somebody didn't think to do it in the erp. One of my managers was set to go in and use Excel to merge the lists, but I realized he would have to do this every month until the end of time. I wrote a quick script on the site to do this anytime the product csv needed to be updated. Write once, run forever.

Early in my career (a long time ago), I was tasked with ordering replacement chargers for some laptops. I ordered several off Amazon and even though they were labeled as being what we wanted, they were apparently bootleg and were not, in fact, the correct charger. Fried a few laptops before I realized Amazon wasn’t the “Amazon” of yore selling first-party parts and I was ordering from random third party sellers. (That was all relatively new at the time. Amazon was a bookstore branching out in my head.)

In fairness, I was a programmer and not an electrical engineer. And chargers back then weren’t exactly USB-C level smart. The barrel charger fit. I just thought “Oh, what a great deal. I’ll order these and get plaudits from my boss for saving money.” It wasn’t even my money.

The other one is that when I was learning to code — I’m self-taught because everyone was back then — I used Vim and invented my own style. All my code was basically unformatted or, at best formatted consistently in a very non-standard way. That’s easy to fix nowadays where I can hit save and my code gets formatted automatically but it wasn’t so simple back then. I still feel bad for the engineer who followed me who had to fix that shit.

I just spent the better part of the day trying to get a "music archival tool" to work, but I wasn't able to get my Spotify account to connect.

The eventual solution I ended up with was to spin up a Windows VM, get the tool connected to my Spotify account there and copy over the config file from the Windows installation to my (Linux BTW) actual computer.

Of course, I've never really dabbled in emulation past old video game consoles, so getting a Windows VM up and running involved its own troubleshooting... The whole thing felt absurd, especially since there are so many easy ways to download music, but this was one of those times where I didn't want to let the computer best me.