Asklemmy

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.

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

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.

chmod -R 777 *

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

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.

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

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.

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

Dead PC.

Unplug PC.

Lick finger.

Stick finger against 3 metal bits where cord goes on power supply.

Plug in PC.

PC works.

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.

Somewhat related.

I was doing a winter mountaineering course in Scotland (not as epic as it sounds, but damn fun!). We had some pretty gnarly weather, and were practicing navigation in a whiteout. It's pretty easy to lose your sense of direction, there's no landmarks, no reference for what is straight ahead. So the lead person was trudging along, looking down at the compass, following a heading, trudging off into the blank whiteness in a straight line. Every now and then, they would start veering off to the left, then go back straight again- just enough to be perceptible to the people at the back of the line, but not to the person in front. We pulled up a couple of times, lead person kept insisting they were following the compass precisely. It kept happening, so we switched people, same compass, no problem.

It was only when we were back at the lodge and the original lead person was saying how much they loved their electric heated gloves that we figured out what the issue was.

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

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.

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".

Beating things up in hopes it works. Its weird how often it worked

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Lots of percussive maintenance going on around here, but one that sticks in my mind was testing some of the first 486DX PCs in 1990. One particular specimen from Compaq would only boot after hard power off by taking the lid off and tapping the CPU with a screwdriver. Worked fine after that.

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

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).

I have possibly the dumbest workaround to anything in history

bindntr=CTRL,C,exec,hyprctl activewindow | rg -q "class: Wfica" && ( sleep 0.02 && hyprctl closewindow class:alacrittyclipboard ; alacritty -qq --config-file ~/.config/alacritty/alacrittyclipboard.toml --class 'alacrittyclipboard' --title 'Office 365 Desktop (SSL/TLS Secured, 256 bit)' -e sh -c 'sleep 0.03 && xclip -o | copyq copy - ; copyq clipboard | xclip -i' ) & ( sleep 0.2 && closewindow class:alacrittyclipboard )

windowrulev2 = float,class:(alacrittyclipboard) 

windowrulev2 = stayfocused,class:(alacrittyclipboard) 

windowrulev2 = noborder,class:(alacrittyclipboard) 

windowrulev2 = noanim,class:(alacrittyclipboard) 

windowrulev2 = noblur,class:(alacrittyclipboard) 

windowrulev2 = opacity 0,class:(alacrittyclipboard) 

windowrulev2 = maxsize 1 1,class:(alacrittyclipboard) 

allow me to explain this monstrocity... the clipboard in citrix workspace is broken in a stupid way

it doesn't update the system clipboard unless you move focus away from the window... and out of focus windows can't update the clipboard for security reasons... this makes it so that if I hit ctrl c when citrix is open it opens a terminal window that's tiny, invisible and steals focus that essentially forces the clipboard to work.

nonsense hack, but it works

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

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.

Definitely just poking a stick inside a printer

Absolutely nothing. Works surprisingly often.

Just thought of another one. I have an old Amiga 1200 which doesn't get powered up much but I accidentally dropped it in a move. Since then it's been prone to randomly crashing. Opened it up, nothing appeared to be dislodged. Somehow discovered that if I prop it up at an angle it doesn't crash any more.

"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.

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)_/¯

After troubleshooting and rebuilding a pc of a customer back then 6 times , reinstalling it , changing all cables , checking every single hardware connector for damages and they were all pristine , no tools showed errors or anything.

Put the ram into another pc to check it , pc did boot fine , checked no errors , put the ram back in the other pc and pc boots , no issues , 7 day long term test no issues at all.

Idk what it was till today , don't forget I had rebuilt the pc multiple times prior the ram just worked after being in another pc , I even took it a few times out and put back to make sure that the clamps are OK and connector and it wasn't just luck nope , worked every single time afterwards.

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.