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.
Told someone to take their headset off their keyboard when help application kept appearing on their screen.
I can’t say I’ve never been confused by keystrokes from objects laying on my keyboard, but I do usually figure it out within a couple of seconds at most.
I had to get someone to find a wireless keyboard they left in a random box because they never used it, yet they still connected the USB receiver for it.
My coworker was frustrated that his laptop kept shutting down randomly, going to sleep while he was typing. I looked at his wrists and asked if he was wearing magnetic bracelet, which was 100% the cause. Laptop has magnet sensors to detect the lid was closing, so it went to sleep. His destress (/s) tool became the source of considerable stress until I figured that out
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 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 coworker who kept complaining anytime she’d open any dialog boxes they immediately closed. Turns out she had a binder sitting on the edge of her keyboard right on the escape key.
How did she take it?
She was also quite embarrassed. As a fix, we moved her keyboard a few inches.
Hard.
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 still see this every few months.
I think it’s happening if a key is released at the same time as a window opens or changes to full screen, but it’s too rare to properly troubleshoot. The fix is still the same.
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.
I think this might actually be the dumbest. My fear of electricity is one of the main reasons I focus my tech shenanigans on the software side of things rather than the hardware.
You have to do a lot more work on the software side to release the magic smoke
OK, this wins. Far out…
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
Hard drive in the freezer. Broken actuator. Well, I put the entire laptop in. Early 00s probably. Worked for like 3 minutes.
Think I’ve done this one too! Desperately trying to rescue some data off a hard drive which just went click click click. Freeze it, try again, works for a few minutes until it warms back up and click click click…
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
Like the good old days of manual segmentation lol
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.
Damn, either you were a really smart 13 year old, or you must have been super desperate and then amazed that that actually worked.
Looking back, I have zero ideas on where I came up with the idea or why I even tried it!
“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 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.
Removed the plastic film on a brand new phone when someone complained that the earpiece sounded bad during calls
