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.
Told someone to take their headset off their keyboard when help application kept appearing on their screen.
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.
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.
Removed the plastic film on a brand new phone when someone complained that the earpiece sounded bad during calls
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
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.
chmod -R 777 *😊 this is how you take your Linux security and make it Windows
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.
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
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.
Friend’s desktop was so fried from Kazaa and Limewire, that he couldn’t even open an Windows explorer window. Ended up opening Notepad and copying all of his files to a thumbdrive using the file open dialog box before reformatting.
Didn’t notepad file dialogue also use explorer?
IIRC, yes but it’s called differently. I’ve used that technique to work around nannyware a time or two.
This kind of hacky dumb workaround is exactly what I wanted to read when I posted this thread, haha. It’s kind of genius but also I’m horrified to imagine how things got to that point.
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!
I stabbed a router with a knife twice and it worked. It knew I wasn’t fucking around now.
We’ve tried talking, we’ve tried percussive maintenance, now it’s time to take things up a notch and let these silly little machines know who’s boss.
Stabbed twice…worked like a dream afterwords.
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.
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.
OK, this wins. Far out…
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
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.
