Asklemmy

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 25% ~~50%~~ duty cycle.

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.

Around 2013-2014ish when the fake FBI viruses when commen, I worked at a tech help desk at my university fixing student computers.

We didn't have a bootable virus scan avaliable but I discovered it you ctrl-alt-deleted you could tell the system to log out, it would close everything and log out.

but if during a split second when the device was turning on before the virus blocked the screen and actions you opened a word doc or something,

then when you logged out it would close everything (including the virus's window that was blocking the screen) but the word doc and ask if you wanted to save the document first. By hitting cancel it would stop the logout completely and we could run the various virus scans to get rid of it.

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 started 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

For several years my pc would only turn on while at a 45degree angle, not on its side and not upright but tilted 45degrees. After it turned on I could put it back and it'd be fine.

Eventually I moved and the pc ended up upside down and shaken, I put it down and a screw fell out of the psu. Problem solved!

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

First things first: if people call me they really have a problem and 9 times out of 10 it is not their fault. But, me standing next to the machine while they reproduce the problem "fixes" it about half the time.

Seems like random glitches that only last a minute or two.

Stopped using the PC for a week. Came back and an update came out and everything was good. Sometimes theres nothing you can do.

For starters I'm old enough that if your TV or monitor was fuzzy or blurry you gave it a good bang on the top. This worked 50% of the time and was considered common practice but it sounds stupid in retrospect.

But wait there's more: I boiled a demo disc (videogame magazines used to come with a disc of demos for new or unreleased games). During a particular print run of Official Xbox Magazine many of the shipped discs would skip or fail to read and dropping them into boiling water for about 30 seconds was a way change the refractory index of the plastic and fix something that was causing the laser to be unable to read them.

I guess this is my jam because that last one reminded me of another hilarious practice from that era: "Toweling" an Xbox. First generation hardware of the Xbox 360 we're prone to detecting an overheat and sometimes entering a state where they wouldn't boot up anymore and display an iconic "Red ring of death" where the LEDs on the front would light up red and it would it never finished booting. But it was running, just it wouldn't continue. While it was getting a little warm, it seemed to be more a failure of the sensor rather than a catastrophic overheating. So naturally the solution was... Get it hotter. Wrap it in towels blocking all of the fans from doing their job and get it hot enough that the sensor would seem to go out of range and reset itself. This returned it to normal operation for hours or days, for some people indefinitely. Fortunately I haven't "toweled" any electronics lately.

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).

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

Definitely just poking a stick inside a printer

My electric piano requires a very accurate punch in order to the A3 key to work again, I've even read in forums that is the ONLY WAY to fix it. Sounded dumb at the time but it was the fix.

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.

I'm not sure if this counts because it wasn't intentional on my part, but... When I was a kid, my mom had a digital camera. The lense on it would extend when it was powered on, and then retract when it was powered off.

At some point the lense got stuck, which caused the camera to not turn on properly and made it useless so she ended up getting a new one. I had gone to take the old/broken one to mess around with it and accidentally dropped it.

Apparently the angle that it fell at was just enough to "lodge" the lense back into place yet the fall wasn't high enough to cause it to shatter or break. It worked perfectly after that, and while my parents were a bit upset they needlessly bought a new camera, they ended up letting me keep the old one.

(Later on I figured that was their way of justifying not returning the new camera that probably had nice new features or something)

I also vaguely remembering them saying something along the lines of "That's probably the only time in your life dropping a piece of equipment will actually fix it and was just luck - don't go trying that on other things randomly".

chmod -R 777 *

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