Definitely just poking a stick inside a printer
Had a dvd player that would skip all the time even if it was a brand new dvd. Got pissed off and threw it at the wall. Girlfriend plugged it back in a couple hours later and it never skipped again.
Maybe not dumb just dark and absurd, but called the cops.
Worked at a retail computer store with repair shop. Extremely assholish customer drops off his machine for an install of a “defective” piece of hardware he couldn’t manage to install on his own, arguing that install should be free because it’s our fault, somehow. Service manager cuts him a deal anyway just to make him happy.
He drops off his PC. Tech takes the machine, boots it up, bam… CSAM on his desktop. Cops came and got the PC, never saw the piece of shit again.
Actually this happened a few times but only once was the customer rude at first.
Retail is depressing.
Do I want to know what csam means?
When I worked as an intern in a fancy restaurant I had my workspace in the kitchen below the radio (which was always on when we were prepping). I had braces at the time and the general opinion was, that I was functioning as an extension to the antenna. The radio was only working when I stood at one specific spot (or when I was not present at all).
The old televisions. Used to be able to get a better signal by sticking a paper clip in the back; and then taking another paper clip and bending it so it can connect to the first while gripping a butterknife
In my early 20s I had a part-time job as a pizza delivery driver. When there were no deliveries, I would answer phones or take orders at the counter. One day one of the touchscreen monitors at the counter stopped working. It was just black all the time. So we were told not to use it.
A few days later I was on lunch shift and bored, I was trying random things to see if I could fix the monitor. Switched the inputs, switched to a different VGA cable, etc. At one point I discovered the touch panel was still working, I could interact with the OS, even though nothing was displaying. I was pressing around different areas of the screen and I accidentally found that pressing right in the centre of the screen caused the display to re-appear! It would disappear again after a few seconds. Press that spot again, it came back. I was fascinated by this, I showed some coworkers, they didn’t care.
Over the course of the day it was getting harder to make the display re-appear. It gradually needed to be pressed quite forcefully to come back. I stared using my knuckles to knock sharply on the spot, and that was working.
When my manager arrived for the night shift, I was excited to show him my discovery. I said “hey man, I kinda fixed this monitor, watch this!” And I enthusiastically knocked hard on the centre of the screen with my first. The LCD lit up and showed the display, but at the same time shattered in a rainbow ring the shape of my fist.
The look on my manager’s face was of awe and horror. I was trying to explain what I had meant to do, but I realised what it must’ve looked like to him. “Hey man, watch me fix this monitor!” Before smashing the screen with a swift punch. It wasn’t possible to explain it a way that didn’t sound crazy.
In the end I convinced him that the monitor was faulty anyway, and we were going to replace it anyway, so my accident breaking it more is not a big deal.
In engineering speak, that’s referred to as “percussive maintenance”.
I had a situation ten or so years ago working on a machine that displayed an error code i didn’t recognize. I looked in the manual, and it had descriptions for error messages like (E1, E2, etc.), but the message was a couple numbers higher than the highest error in the manual (and as a side note, it’s really dumb to program a machine to give an error message without a corresponding key).
I looked through the handwritten old log book for the machine, and found someone referencing the same error code in the early 90’s. The error back then occurred after the machine was moved, but it cleared up after being moved again. We guessed that the issue was a loose connection that got jostled back into place. The machine had just been moved slightly again before our issue, so we assumed it was the same.
We ended up opening the machine, and just poking around until we hit the right wire that reconnected itself and cleared the error message. We wrote that down in the log book as a “digital re-alignment” (digital as in fingers).
Sounds exactly like some shit that would happen to me, lmao. Glad you didn’t lose your job over it!
At a previous job we were swapping a ton of laptops out with newer models and at the end of it the boss let us know that we could keep some of the old ones for ourselves if we wanted. Everyone then set about to re-imaging their designated laptop only to find that there was some Dell encryption on the drive that functionally bricked it if you didn’t unlock it before you formatted it (I don’t remember the specifics but none of us were able to figure out how to bypass this). We only had one laptop left that hadn’t been touch and still had the app necessary to unencrypt them but there was only one hard drive slot so I ended up pulling the dvd drive out and sticking a sata cable in the slot for that and using an old PSU off the shelf and jumping it to actually power the drive. It was incredibly janky but it worked.
Was playing Pokemon Platinum trying to catch Rotom while a friend was struggling to get his Nintendo DS to read a game cartridge. Part of catching Rotom is walking up to old electronics in a haunted building and smacking it, including an old CRT TV. Since my friend was still struggling with his DS after I caught Rotom, I walked up to the old CRT in the room we were in and thumped it with my hand on the side. His DS started working again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“Power off, then on again.” This was after a mystifying issue where the printer would do the invoice format and backgrounds, but refuse to print the text, and had a seasoned copier tech stumped. Still scratching my head on that one.
I have a pixel 8 and had a faulty screen caused by poorly installed latches that held down the screen. Slapping above the power button seemed to fix it for about 20 minutes.
An ice tray to cold down a router.
I changed ISP, the new one told me that it would take like a week to send me the credentials to use my own ADSL router 🙄, in the meantime I had to use the cheap-ass one they provided.
The new service crashed like after five minutes of use, after some some back and force with the technical support unsuccessfully I notice that the router was extremely hot when the connection crashed and normal when it started to work again.
It has not any cooling system, and being in the middle of the summer didn’t help either.
So…. I tried to put an ice tray from the freezer on the router and it worked. To be “safe” I put a plastic bag between them to avoid any condensation dripping onto the device.
Beating things up in hopes it works. Its weird how often it worked
People who say violence never solved anything have never really been intimate with a printer
Absolutely nothing. Works surprisingly often.
Took an angle grinder to a mini-ITX case to fit a full ATX size board in it.
The board is resting unsecured on an anti-static bag and has a few mm of wiggleroom.
The powersupply is resting, unsecured to anything, on top of the PCIe lanes.
The rear fan is pressed up against the back grill by cables.
The harddrives are just kinda chilling where-ever.
The cables are routed with hopes and dreams.This is a hypervisor and is the backbone of all my infrastructure.
What a unique abomination. I salute you.
At least it’s not with a customer.
I’m a web applications developer…. So a lot. But here’s the king of dumb shit fixes I’ve done. Back in the days of VGA a few friends and I met up with some other dudes for a counter strike LAN party. Everyone’s hauling their towers in and if you were lucky, your heavy as fuck 17” CRT. So I set up and my monitor won’t work. Has power, no signal. Switch from the gpu vga port to the integrated one and it works. Switch back to gpu and it works as long as I hold it in a weird position. So it’s all fine, just the connection is wearing out. For some reason I figure a little moisture will help so I lick the vga plug, reattach it and it totally solved the problem.
So yeah, I licked a gpu into working again.
Kinky
