What Was Your Worst Computer Accident? 1542
Posted
by
timothy
from the you-mean-besides-the-railgun dept.
from the you-mean-besides-the-railgun dept.
Anonymous Writer writes "I learned years ago to backup regularly and never keep a drink on the same table as a laptop. I accidentally spilled a drink onto my laptop's keyboard where it drained into the laptop's innards, ruining the motherboard, CD-ROM, and hard drive. Thousands of dollars and all my data disappeared in a flash. Considering that there are even people out there that intentionally damage hardware, I was wondering what kind of disasters Slashdot readers have experienced."
Worst computer accident? (Score:5, Funny)
Bad mistake (Score:2, Funny)
I bought a Dell. (Score:5, Funny)
Using a CPU probe. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Mouse Pee (Score:5, Funny)
Cookies in the psu (Score:4, Funny)
The Worst. (Score:5, Funny)
Well umm (Score:5, Funny)
Several years ago, I was running Win95 I think.. I have this friend who I wanted to scare so I wrote a little app in VB that when he ran would pretend it was erasing his hard drive. It worked good but there was no disk activity so you could tell it was fake. So I decided I'd try opening the files I was listing as being deleted. I tested my code on 1 file, it worked. So I ran the whole program (which would cycle through each directory on the drive, but not sub-directories). When it ended, I was happy because it worked, I had lots of disk activity.
Then I tried opening a program and it said it was corrupt, then I noticed lots of files were corrupt, then I noticed EVERY file on the main directories of my drive were 0 bytes.. That's when I realized my disk activity code was opening every file to have data written to it (the output function in vb i think)..
So basically every file on the root of my drive and in all the main directries (not sub-directories though) were erased.
That sucked.
Re:wrong dir (Score:3, Funny)
Way Back in 1970 (Score:5, Funny)
Hitting reset in the middle of a re-org is a bad idea. Department lost everything, except that it didn't really lose everything. Everything was still in files, but the files were scrambled. They printed out the contents of each file, figured out what file each fragment belonged to, and typed it all back in.
Fortunately, this hard disk was only a megabyte or so.
My worst. (Score:1, Funny)
[working away in my home directory, I notice a bunch of files are owned by another user]:
su -
password: xxxxxxxx
chown myUid.myGrp *
chmod 700 *
exit
Spot the mistake
I did something similar.. (Score:5, Funny)
Boy that was embarassing.
Re:Cookies in the psu (Score:2, Funny)
Power supply: an E-Z Bake oven for
Re:Cookies in the psu (Score:5, Funny)
About two years ago... (Score:3, Funny)
Ended up typing "dd if=floppy.img of=/dev/hda bs=1024 count=300"
Needless to say the system continued to operate for a week or so, although here were random errors everywhere. Saved most all my data though.
After that day I always made sure
Not mine but.. (Score:5, Funny)
Then he asked if I could fix it...
Involving a friend of course... (Score:2, Funny)
Well, he formatted the partitions on the new drive as he went, and he once somehow forgot to copy the data on one of the partitions after creating the new one on the 1.6GB drive. I ended up losing all of my porn (Very Very Important to a fifteen year old) and most of the games that I'd downloaded off of the local BBSes, like Doom shareware. So, I was kind of pissed off. It sucked a lot at the time.
I once had another weird one where the hard disk drive that the OS was installed on for my RAID box (2GB SCSI drive for OS, four 120GB IDE drives for RAID) blew a controller chip. It stank up the computer room something fierce! Anyway, I had a second drive of the same type and model, so I just swapped controller boards and it came back. Still running that way too, about two years later.
Costly iBook Mistake (Score:2, Funny)
Honest (Score:5, Funny)
After more than 15 years in Unix-land, why did I make *that* move? What was I thinking? I'm so glad that it was about that time that Linux made Unix accessible "for the rest of us".
Duck poop fried my keyboard... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'm a 9800 Pro Killer (Score:2, Funny)
A few years back (Score:2, Funny)
Finally, I got a call from one of the local computer hardware stores informing me they had just receieved a shipment of these beasts, so I ran down there like a little child at christmas and forked over the cash.
I got home and opened up the packaging, then pryed open my box, I unscrewed one of the PCI blanking plates and tried to remove it, but it was bent and didn't want to budge, so I pulled as hard as I could, it came off and I went flying backwards right into the table beside me, I had a full pint glass of coke on the table which spilt into the case (and also over my keyboard).
Turns out that coke isn't only bad for teeth, its not good for x86 hardware either. Needless to say, I never did get around to playing GLQuake that day :(
Rookie Linux mistake (Score:5, Funny)
Debian, especially back then, was not a good newby distro. After installing it, I was left at a blank terminal thinking, "Okay, now what."
In my frustration trying to set up X, I decided "to hell with it, I'll install Slackware," and I hastily did a "rm -rf /"
As I listened to my noisy hard drive chug a long, I remembered that I had mounted my Windows partition.
"But surely Linux will know I only wanted to rm the Linux part."
Yeah, I was wrong.
My poor 486 (Score:5, Funny)
For me it is... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The Worst. (Score:5, Funny)
In a somewhat unrelated (and more painful) story, using my vast intellect I once attempted to replace a PCI card (of some sort) in a running computer and shocked the shit out of myself. Twice . In less than ten minutes. Apparently I didn't learn that lesson.
- Ben
When I was in college and Linux was young... (Score:5, Funny)
The next morning, I wake up, somewhat hung over, and decide that this directoy was a /stupid/ idea. So, I execute the obvious command:
I then wander off in search of some tylenol, and come back with two term papers irretrievably lost.The obvious moral of this story is, "don't root under the influence." (From my more mature perspective, I would like to suggest that drinking less might also be a good plan.)
drop database (Score:2, Funny)
our search index software had a sql-like interface. big bossman was sitting at DBA's computer and intending to drop the search index. he alt-tabbed to the wrong window, to the production database interface and issued the drop database command.
goodbye production data, e-commerce site was down for 7 hours. costing the company at least $5.
Don't drop the server. (Score:5, Funny)
My Top 10 List (Score:5, Funny)
9. Sitting on a brand new Pentium 4 accidentally, bending all the pins
8. Not getting a UPS/surge strip/voltage regulator. Over time, the voltage irregularities caused my power supply to literally catch on fire.
7. Installing Windows.
6. Falling for the "hey, try rm -rf
5. Dropping a monitor down the stairs
4. Taking over an NT domain accidentally by running samba as a PDC
3. Leaving a P4 laptop running inside a closed, insulated laptop case. Literally everything overheated.
2. "Accidentally" adding DELTREE C:\
1. Posting this list on Slashdot.
Re:I bought a Dell. (Score:5, Funny)
My first Trojan Horse (Score:5, Funny)
The problem was, while we were helping other students, some people would steal disks because they were expensive and we had all the coolest games.
One day after my entire box disappearing, I sat in the lab pissed. I wrote an INIT program for the Apple DOS that would ask for a password, two wrong guesses and it would trash the disk and erase itself from RAM. My first attempt was pretty much done, but I had no disks because they were recently stolen. So I saved it on the classroom disk everyone stores their work on. I named it "DO NOT RUN THIS PROGRAM" and left for the day.
The following day, I arrived and the instructor grabbed be by the shirt and shoved me up against the wall and shouted:
"Did you save a program the the class disk called 'do not run this program'? Because some little asshole decided to run it and we lost all the assignments and all of my grades for the semester!"
I did what anyone would do in that situation. I lied my ass off.
Another example:
Flash forward 12 years or so. In the lab at my company. We are trying out control software for relay control on an electrical switches about the size of filing cabinets. There are about 128 relays in each, and the suckers were hooked up on 120VAC. This was our only time to run test software before they got shipped out to the customer the next day.
Started up the software and all seemed ok. An odd smell started and I noticed the room's ambient light was changing... sorta orangish. I turned around and they were glowing hot and smoke was billowing out. I killed power, but it was way too late. 2-3" holes were burned in the PC boards. Later I found out the tech who hooked up the power didn't know what to hook the relays up to, so he wired them straight to ground. That didn't stop me from crapping bricks for the next few hours as the entire company showed up at the lab doors to see what the horrible smell was coming from.
Re:Well umm (Score:1, Funny)
Unfortunately, he walked in before we were finished. Though he didn't see us doing anything (we very quickly stepped away from his terminal), we didn't have a chance to set things up correctly. When he tried to reboot his computer the next day, the backdoor was causing slight problems (by which I mean that the computer refused to boot).
6 hours later, thoroughly pissed off at Dell technical support (who, incidentally, asked if he was running Windows three hours after he first got them on the phone) and at the fact that he had to miss quite a lot of class, he asked why we were sticking around to help him with the problem when we clearly weren't at fault. Oops =).
Re:A solution to almost all liquid problems (Score:5, Funny)
I was going to moderate this but I couldn't find "-1, self-righteous" in the list.
Mojo Story (Score:2, Funny)
The Mojo Story.
And so it began.... sitting on my kitchen floor, building a new DC box while indulging in some of the finer versions of ethanol-based liquid refreshment. Halfway through the boxen building, I realized two things....
1. I was out of good scotch.
2. I hadn't started mixing the "mojo" for the party.
Now "mojo" is a particularly vile mixture of pure grain alcohol, Cherry CoolAid powder and chunks of citrus fruits. (Please note the lack of water or any other diluent)
Mojo recipe:
4 gallons (~16 litres if you care) of 97% ethanol.
8 packages of sweetened cherry Cool Aid.
various oranges, limes, lemons, old shoes...cut into large chunks
Mix thoroughly, with bare hand, while chanting "Nothing good can come of this."
Place outside in snow to cool. (keep animals away! This stuff may kill anything smaller than a camel!)
Somewhere around the "mix thoroughly" part, the whisky, which I'd been drinking to aid in building the new DC box, kicked me in the back of the head......Hard. This scattered my data, and made my numbers go all random, causing a nasty chain reaction of stumbling, losing coordination and dumping 4 gallon of noxious red liquid into a brand new tbird.
I don't mean "splashing a little on the box". I mean pouring 4 gallons of mojo directly into an open case, a direct hit on the northbridge. Now, as we all know, cases are not watertight. The mojo started escaping into every corner of the kitchen. I sprang into action in an attempt to contain the dangerous stuff.
Unfortunately "springing into action" isn't very easy to do when you've just polished off a bottle of whisky. So I sort of "stumbled into mayhem" instead. My left foot placed itself directly into the PC case, crunching parts galore, my right foot then decided it wanted no part of this and left for vacation. This had the unfortunate result of leaving me with no means of maintaining my upper body's position above the floor.
Please pause here for a visual reference.
relic, dumbfounded look on his face, stained red to his crotch with mojo, one foot in a PC case, the other slipping radiply away causing an awkward "splits" position...with floor awash in red liquid. I did the only thing I could do. I fell forward, leading with my face, into the ocean of mojo on the floor.
The resulting splash was absolutely amazing.
Bright-red, ethanol-disolved coloring reached the ceiling. Tendrils of mojo snaked past the cabinet doors and coated the clean dishes and food in the pantry. The telephone immediately took on a pastel pink color as the mojo ethched it's way into every surface.
The moral of the story? If you remember nothing else I've said....at least remember this....never build boxen on the kitchen floor.
56k (Score:2, Funny)
Due to the fact that i was on dial-up, there was a phone cable stretched across from the table to the wall.
Heh.
So, about 2 hours into surfing, my dog (who was sitting on the chair next to me at the time) sees a small girl walk by our driveway. This excites him so much, that he bounds over me... right THROUGH the modem cable, pulling my laptop off the table onto the tile floor.
Picking it up, I see that everything is fine, except for about 80% of the screen. I brought it in to TekServ in NYC, and they told me Apple would designate it as "abuse."
I eventually replaced the screen and still use the same Powerbook today, but it was still a very traumatic experience.
Re:Duck poop fried my keyboard... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:wrong dir (Score:2, Funny)
Swing it towards the ground like a two-by-four and watch all the keys fly all over the room. It's even funnier if you record it and one of the keys flies straight into the microphone or lens.
Yes, CRTs are very durable. It took me and a friend over two hours to break his old monitor. He dragged it by the VGA cord over curbs and such and nothing. Dropped it into a muddy creek and still nothing. Pulled it out and tossed it way into the air and finally it smashed into a bunch of little pieces.
One of my new neighbors managed to find my old, broken monitor sitting by the curb of a dumpster at my old place and picked it up. About two weeks later, I hear PSSCSCHCHKCHCKHCKHCHCHHSSSSSSHHHHH!! That's the sound of a 19" monitor breaking. The guy who did it drives a crappy Toyota wagon he regularly beats the shit out of and shared my appetite for destruction. I was glad to see the monitor go.
I'm on my third keyboard, second monitor (CRT), and second mouse (about to smash this one too because it sucks) by the way. I love breaking stuff.
Re:Well umm (Score:5, Funny)
Yup.
Duron crushed core (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Duck poop fried my keyboard... (Score:4, Funny)
(Great commercials)
Re:Well umm (Score:5, Funny)
He was in his VB class making a program and at the end it would print it's contents. He decided it would be cool to have it ask how many copies you wanted. So he coded it.
It turns out he forgot to define the variable he used, so instead of printing 1 copy, it got stuck in a loop of printing.
As mentioned above this was during a class, which had a laser printer that printed at least 5 sheets a second.
Holy Sparking Power Supply, Batman! (Score:4, Funny)
Anyhow, I picked it up, noting that for a 486 in storage, the case was relatively clean. I then took it down to our workbench, and after spending half an hour trying to scrounge up an old DOS disk to boot it and reformat it with(we were a Mac shop, this was no easy task), I finally got ready to service it.
So, I plugged a cord in to a power strip, then move to plug the other end in to the power supply, when all of a sudden you hear that familiar zap sound. Sparks started flying from the power supply, and I did the whole "life flashes before my eyes" thing before I managed to pull the cable away, to quite a gruesome sight.
The total list of causalities included the power supply, who's prongs were all charred black, the power cord, the prongs on the cord(also charred black), and a totally fried power strip. Thankfully, my hand came out unscathed, although I don't know why.
Later examination of the now dead 486 showed that it had a power supply from 1982(this ordeal took place in 2002, BTW), so the fact that it was 20 years old probably had something to do with it. How such an old power supply ended up in a machine that couldn't be more than 13 years old I'll never figure out, but there it was.
I then proceeded to rip the hard drive out, and take a hammer to it. It was unorthodox, but I sure felt better afterwords.
Y2k (Score:2, Funny)
Went to the top floor of my mom's house and instead of watching the New York ball drop, we dropped a Y2k non-compliant computer out the window. Then we walked down to the local high school, walked up to the top of the bleachers, and dropped it again off the back. Then we beat it into little tiny bits with sledge hammers. The old monitor we brought too didn't make as much noise as we thought it would. Then the cops came and we ran. It was fun.
July 3, 2000, went to a gun shop bought a bottle of smokeless gun powder, a 2 foot long fuse, and got a free empty Co2 cartridge. Filled the cartridge with powder, plugged it with the fuse, and epoxy'd the fuse into the opening.
July 4, 2000, sometime at night in an abandoned baseball field:
Took a computer out to the field with the Co2 cartridge in the middle and the fuse out one of the floppy drive bays. Lit the fuse and ran for a 1/4 mile. We still felt the concussion.
Everything that was soldered onto the motherboard fell off. Apparently the heat from the explosion flash melted everything off. A side of the cartridge hit the bottom of the hard drive and buckled the sides and plates inside. It was done in a way that I don't think a vice and sledge hammer could have done. The wimpy cover caught a bit of the cartridge too, but it just got an indentation from it and flattened out (cheap one piece coverall case). All the sides of the case buckled, too. I saved a stick of the ram and the hard drive, but I think they were lost as part of getting married.
Flaming Death (Score:5, Funny)
I had 2 4M SIMMs (same), 2 8M SIMMs (different) and 1 16M SIMM. I was placing them in random order in a PC, trying to achieve maximum RAM capacity. Conclusions? 4M+4M=1M, 8M+4M+4M=12M, 8M+8M=8M, 8M+16M=20M, 16M+4M+4M=a violent burst of flame from the motherboard.
More 486 (Score:4, Funny)
I reached out for the nearest pointy thing with which to ever-so-carefully bend the prong back into shape.
It turns out a pencil was not the best thing to use - I rendered to entire motherboard useless via graphite shavings.
All the same, with a new motherboard the chip itself worked fine...
I can't believe he said this (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Easy!! (Score:2, Funny)
That's not accident! That's sabotage!
Embedded WLAN (Score:4, Funny)
The laptop landed on the PCMCIA WLAN card, this became a embedded wireless card.
The good news is the home insurance paid out.
Re:On a similar note... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My first Trojan Horse (Score:2, Funny)
I took a standard 3 1/2" floppy disk and used DOS debug to read the first 512 bytes of the disk (the boot sector) into memory. I disassembled the boot sector to see what the program did, then at an appropriate place I inserted a JMP FFFF:FFF0. (jump to the reset vector)
After writing the modified boot sector back to the floppy, I would take the disk and insert it in a random floppy drive. When the computer's owner booted it up, the machine would run through the BIOS checks, load the floppy boot sector, execute it, reset itself, run through the BIOS checks, load the floppy boot sector, and so on until the hapless owner ejected the floppy disk.
I called it my "reboot" disk. Note that the same technique could be applied to a hard drive boot sector, but I didn't feel quite that mean.
Re:Mouse Pee (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Duck poop fried my keyboard... (Score:5, Funny)
I was at Disneyland ( California ). There were a gaggle of ducks around the area around the boats. A young child, full of the magic of the Disney environment, excitedly chased, and caught, a duck, holding it up high for all to see. "Momma! Momma! I gotta Duck!!!!".
Well, the duck let fly with a humongous amount of poop. Didn't know that much poop could fit in a duck.
The kid was drenched. He had an audience of at least 1,000 onlookers each having cameras to capture magic moments. Everywhere I looked, the kid was at the center of hundreds of lenses. And the look on his momma's and poppa's face...
The duck was promptly released, and the kid and parents just kinda disappeared.
Re:On a similar note... (Score:5, Funny)
That was a *mistake*?
What 'Where' clause? (Score:2, Funny)
Worst Computer Accident (Score:2, Funny)
Monday mornig, I fessed up to the boss that I'd wiped out one file. Calmly he explained that from now on I should back things up regularly...
Knocked over an Entire Rack (Score:5, Funny)
One of the servers on the rack had a CD drive that was somewhat broken, it didn't open when you pushed the button. So, doing what I always did, I sat at the workstation a few feet away and logged in remotely. I gave the command for to eject the CD, and as it did, I watched a very full server rack teeter forward from the weight of the CD tray, and then crash to the floor.
I was very lucky my boss had taken his Zoloft that day.
Re:On a similar note... (Score:5, Funny)
I was 11 at the time, and when my dad found out he wasn't very happy...
Re:Worst computer accident? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Mouse Pee (Score:5, Funny)
Are you sure that's the computer manual and not your Mogwai [google.com] manual?
My biggest computer mistake? (Score:0, Funny)
Re:2 hard drives, one power supply (Score:3, Funny)
But I had just sat down to sign onto AOL (this is many years ago, okay?
But anyway, I took the dead power supply and took it apart (what was, I later realized when I read about the very large amounts of power stored in the capacitors was another harmless mistake). One of the corners of the inside of the case was charred, and a resister nearby was also quite black. The fuse had gone too.
You'd think that this'd clue me into the fact that it was completely dead, but no. I decided I wanted to see if replacing the fuse would be enough to make it work. But, as I didn't happen to have another fuse handy, I took an inch and a half of stranded wire, stripped maybe 1/3" off each end, and bent the strands outward so the piece looked like a capital I. I put this down onto the fuse clips, plugged in the PS, got a pair of safety goggles (I'm not completely stupid), stood as far away from the actual PS as the switch cord could reach, and hit the power button. The makeshift "fuse" flew about 3 feet up into the air. After unplugging the PS, I took another look and saw that the current had actually melted the wire and fuse clips some. The clips were deformed, and there was a coating of copper from the wire covering them.
Re:Worst computer accident? (Score:5, Funny)
Hot, very hot (Score:3, Funny)
I had an old AMD K6-2 that was having some stability issues. During troubleshooting I had removed the CPU fan for a few seconds as I was swapping in a known good CPU. At some point I had the fan off but had the machine powered on for about a minute because I got distracted. When I realized my error I immediately pulled the plug. A few minutes passed as I did something else. Then I needed to put back in the original CPU. So I shifted the lever, popped the CPU then put it face down into my palm. It took about 1/2 second before I realized how hot the thing still was but it was too late. A square patch of skin was burned away right at the base of my thumb.
And here's one that didn't happen to me...
One of the employees I'd trained had gone solo, covering three medium sized buildings. Everything went well for close to a year. Then he gave me a call: "Help, the fileservers are down and I've never had to rebuild from scratch." You have backups? "Of course." Whew, no problem then. I make the 100 mile drive and meet him in the server room. Disk is hosed so we rebuild. It takes a while but everything is going smoothly. The OS is in place so I ask him for the data backups. He hands me the tapes. Pop them in but can't retrieve any data. Eh? Don't panic. Check the logs. Backups went successful for the better part of a year. We decide it's probably the tape drive since he mentioned that he'd seen some errors "once or twice". We drive 30 miles to another facility to retrieve a drive and maybe shoot the data across the net. But the same problem at the other facility. OK, keep calm. Backups are showing successful for close to a year. It warns if the tape is bad. It warns if for some reason it can't complete a backup. Crap. Check what's being backed up... Three log files. That's it. For a year he's been backing up three log files, maybe 20K worth in each of them. Data? Nope, not listed in the things that get backed up. But the backup was successful because it was never instructed to do anything else but those three log files...
Re:Worst computer accident? (Score:4, Funny)
cd
cd
It worked, saved all kinds of space, until the next time I tried to run a program and boot
Re:Duck poop fried my keyboard... (Score:4, Funny)
</strongbad>
Re:The Worst. (Score:2, Funny)
That was a mistake?
Re:mkswap (Score:5, Funny)
rm -rf
Didn't think about the fact that ".." matches ".*" d'oh!
Re:2 hard drives, one power supply (Score:1, Funny)
Re:My first Trojan Horse (Score:3, Funny)
I had a Cat astrophe (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Well umm (Score:1, Funny)
Re:mkswap (Score:3, Funny)
See what happens.
Re:Honest (Score:5, Funny)
My all time favorites with laptops (Score:2, Funny)
Problem on paperwork states: "Unit ran over by vehicle. Needs estimate for repair."
Customer set his laptop bag beside his vehicle at the airport parking lot and a vehicle flew into the parking spot next to where he was parked, thumping over the laptop in the process. Multiple parts were held together by only shattered plastic. When I asked the customer why he thought this even could be repaired, he finally consented to a letter for his insurance company stating the unit was unrepairable.
Problem on paperwork: Suspect vomited in laptop. Need estimate for repair.
Ok, now this was one you had to just talk to the customer about. A policeman claimed that a suspect had managed to vomit into his laptop when he was taken into custody. Considering that the suspect would have had to projectile vomit through the security barrier from the back seat to hit the laptop mounted in the front seat compartment, the officer in charge of getting the unit repaired was a bit unconvinced. Needless to say and not taking a chance, I let someone else take over that repair and if I'm not mistaken it was determined not cost effective to repair.
Oh yeah, can't forget the ancient days of the first Canon bubblejet printers brought in for warranty repair. Cockroaches, a baby tooth from someone who didn't have or know any kids and dog hair.
It's always worst when it's your father's. . . (Score:5, Funny)
Oops. oooh. Oh yeah. . . That.
Whew. I'd actually blocked that one from memory. .
Okay. .
So way back when a 486 was something special, I was young and didn't have a cool computer of my own. Upstairs where the adults lived, (I slept in the basement, would you believe?), my father had just such a gleaming-cool 486 with many bells and whistles, the most significant being a sweeeeet laser printer he'd just wrangled out of his job.
We're talking a top-of-the-line Hewlet Packard beast. This was back in the day when HP made good printers rather than the cruddy consumer-level, guaranteed to break within three years junk boxes they sell today. It was a very nice machine and my father was pink with pride about it.
I was working on an art-project at the time, which involved animation cell-painting onto clear sheets of acetate. I'd been running heat-resistant acetate sheets through printers and photo-copiers for a while, outputting line-work for painting on later, so I was all knowledgeable about this. Cocky, even.
But that evening, I'd just used up my last sheet of acetate right in the middle of a job I was really enthusiastic about. I didn't want to wait a whole night just to go out and buy more, so I dug around and actually found a stray sheet. Only problem was, I didn't know where I'd gotten it from, and I didn't know if it was treated for high temperatures or not. .
Can you see where this is going?
Erg. My palms are sweating at the memory. .
So there I was, with this rogue sheet of clear plastic poised over the paper intake of that HP thinking, "Come on! I'm sure it's heat treated. Why would it not be? And anyway, even if it isn't, how bad could things get? Probably at worst, it'd just go a bit warped, right? Just put it through and quit worrying so much, you dork!" So I put it in.
It didn't come out again.
In its place issued a series of interesting sounds and smells. Panic.
My father was in the next room half an hour into watching some hour-long television drama. I remember, clearly, because I can still see in my mind the clock dial telling me that I had exactly 32 minutes to smuggle tools up from the basement, casually walk past the television and into the back room where I was silently, desperately dis-assembling a damned printer.
Have you ever tried to take apart a thirty pound computer appliance on a hardwood floor in total silence as fast as you can? It's difficult! I mean, you drop a single screw and it will bounce off that hardwood with the loudest, "TACK!" you ever heard. And my dad is the suspicious sort who perks his ears up to any unexpected noise. --He spent most of my childhood convinced that his son was a dangerous klutz who could burn down the backyard fence playing with fireworks if given half the chance. (That was a LONG time ago!)
Anyway, my point is that nothing, nothing adds stress to a situation in quite the same way a father does.
While in the process of cutting free a mess of baked-on crusty plastic from the innards of that HP beast, I managed to gouge out big wads of pink rubber stuff from one of the rollers which was certainly not designed to be gouged. That's what you get for rushing. Take the job slowly; you'll only regret it later if you don't. It doesn't matter that you're going to DIE in. . . 14 minutes and counting.
"How's it going in there, Son?"
"Hmm. . ?" Panic. Fear. Adrenaline. Please, please, please, don't come in! Just keep your gnarly head turned toward that flickering TV screen, old man, because I have your fucking printer in pieces all over the floor and crumbs of pink rubber stuff on my guilty fingers. "Oh, just doing some work in Corel Draw, Dad."
"Oh, Corel Draw? Do you need a hand with that? I upgraded to
Oh Nooooo!!! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:A solution to almost all liquid problems (Score:2, Funny)
Cell Phone/Beer/Laptop/Vacuum Cleaner (Score:5, Funny)
It's my fault Falcon 4.0 was so late. (Score:2, Funny)
There were at least 3 large development teams working away in the building; Falcon 4, Star Trek Generations, Tornado, etc. I was in the server room, making some notes about backup tapes, sitting, legs crossed. I was swinging my foot back and forth a little listening to the tunes in the server room over the loud hum of about 15 servers. And all of sudden, click, my foot gently tapped the power switch on the main UPS, the room fell silent, severe lashing ensued. ack!
Fountain of Blood (Score:2, Funny)
I don't think any data was lost or any hardware (other than the pencil) was damaged, though, for what it's worth.
Re:FOR THE LOVE OF FUCK (Score:5, Funny)
My worst computer accident? (Score:1, Funny)
It got stuck. I had to visit the ER.
Re:I bought a Dell. (Score:5, Funny)
Dropping bigger computers (Score:5, Funny)
A friend of mine had a more dramatic but overall better experience with an IBM mainframe. There were two devices (I forget if these were washing-machine size or refrigerator size), and the machines arrived on a Saturday so she went in to have it delivered and signed for. They opened the truck ramp onto the loading dock, and she escorted one of the drivers to the lab with one of the computers. They got back and found that the other driver had moved the truck, in spite of the fact that the ramp had had the other computer sitting on it, so it had fallen three feet down onto concrete. Needless to say, she was concerned, and when the truckers wanted her to sign for the equipment, she refused, and she ended up talking to a sales VP at IBM, which is not a bad trick for a Saturday. He told her to accept it and mark it as damaged, and they'd take care of it (which, being IBM, they did.) The driver indicated "damaged in shipment" on the forms - she crossed it out and wrote "Dropped off loading dock".
Re:Duck poop fried my keyboard... (Score:3, Funny)
It would be a toss up between a few (Score:3, Funny)
- While trouble-shooting a Hewlett Packard 386, I unplugged the keyboard and plugged it back in while the thing was powered up. This apparently fried the motherboard.
- Accidentally nuked the
Classic naivete (Score:3, Funny)
Live (or be allowed to continue to live) and learn, I guess.
Wow this is funny.... (Score:1, Funny)
the person responsible for this will most certainly be pounding careerbuilder.com on tuesday. i begged my boss earlier to let me call her and fire her today but he said no.
TAR (Score:1, Funny)
free up some space:
tar -czvf
Afterwards I begean deleting files and directories from my
tar -czf
Hit CTRL-C but it was too late.
Vomited on an HP laptop (Score:2, Funny)
College Computer Disaster (Score:2, Funny)
Sending 120 volts through the ground pin... (Score:4, Funny)
Back at my parent's house, we were juste done painting so the plastic plaques over the electric outlets were removed. Wanting to print something, I realized that the printer was unplugged. Not really looking at what I was doing, I aimed the printer's plug in the general direction of the outlet... and touched both little screws with the ground pin.
The end result was an inch-wide hole in the printer board, paper that caught fire, a sound very much like pop-corn coming from the computer case, and a completely ruined 486. When I opened it, There weren't many chips still welded to the motherboard. The CPU was stuck somewhere between the hard drive and the floppy, RAM was loose, some cards were welded in place. The last thing to blow was the power supply's fuse, though I can't say I would expect designers to think some wacko would send 120 volts through the parallel port
Cybersex Can Be Dangerous (Score:3, Funny)
I found out the hard way when I -- *ahem* -- managed to jerk off on the keyboard of my newest laptop. The keyboard died instantly (although fortunately, no other components were damaged). I even blogged about it [sopef.org] at the time (with some other blogs [herdesires.net] adding to the discussion).
I still haven't gotten it repaired. I'm currently typing on an external keyboard.
Re:Video Card (Score:3, Funny)
MOD PARENT UP! +1, Funny (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Way Back in 1970 (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Exploding Quantum hard drive (Score:4, Funny)
UPS melted the whole computer (Score:2, Funny)
I'm glad this actually happened to my friend's machine, not mine, too
He'd really gone out of his way to build a reliable machine. Top-quality components throughout, software RAID 1, and even was using a UPS, although the power in Japan is so reliable that I went without one for eight-years and the only time I ever had a power-related outage is because I overloaded the circuit my computers were on and tripped the breaker
Being so careful and using that UPS was his downfall. One day, it shorted out in spectacular fashion, dumping the whole battery load into the computer in an instant. Lots of white smoke escaped, and of course, without the white smoke inside, nothing would work.
The motherboard, memory, CPU, both disk drives, video card, NIC, everything was fried. It was utterly ruined.
This teaches us once again the value of offline backups. You can be super careful and do everything right. Mirroring. UPS. The best components. But a sufficiently large disaster will overcome all those things.
How often do I back up? Not often enough
Quick fix for a blown power supply... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Okay, fess up. Who's washed their cell phones? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The usual.... (Score:1, Funny)
Shite!@#
Since then,
Re: " Open-XP " (Score:4, Funny)
As Windows XP Pro prices approach those of Linux it's quality and usability increase dramatically. I still only use it on one PC, and run Linux for real work, but as a game machine 'Open-XP', as I like to call it, isn't a bad OS.
Argh, I better go feed my parrot.
Re: " Open-XP " (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The Worst. (Score:4, Funny)
Electrocution Story: Learning that Monitors Kill (Score:3, Funny)
So, one day, this guy asks us to make a touch screen kiosk kind of thing that he had seen at the mall. We did all the scripting, he loved it - and then we needed a touch screen. At the time, they were crazy, crazy expensive. But, you could just buy a kit that fit on a standard Amiga monitor for a whole lot less. It did, however, involve opening up your Amiga 1084 monitor and installing a secondary power supply.
So, never having worked on such a thing before, I disassembled my monitor, unplugged it, got to work. When it was installed, I absolutely had to hook up an Amiga and try it out, while guts of the monitor where still exposed.
It tested well, but I was tired. So tired that as I reached for a screwdriver, my bare arm made contact with two hefty capicitors sticking out of the monitor guts.
It was then that I learned about high volts. My arm, involuntarily, swung back so violently that it lifted me out of my chair backwards. I ended up on the floor, on my back, seeing a purple and orange haze, and having no feeling at all in my arm.
The haze went away. My arm stopped tingling about an hour later. The client never paid for his touch screen kiosk.
Jonathan
Shut down a powerplant? (Score:3, Funny)
That shutdown an applicance in a powerplant, and suddently loosing this connection, everything triggered the way it was supposed to: The plant was shutdown with the emergency signal.
It takes serveral hours to bring a powerplant back online.
A short time later, the shutdown command was re-fitted to ask for the password - which throughout the site was changed to contain the name of the server.
Re:My poor 486 (Score:3, Funny)
Desk space is at a premium, so I keep this old Mac LC keyboard on top of the monitor, I rarely use it anyway. Well the monitor is near the window, and one day while trying to coax the screen back into position, the keyboard slipped and almost went right out the window, where it would have smashed my Corvette's hatch glass.
I don't keep keyboards there anymore, and I'll move the car next time I mess with the screen.
Re:Worst computer accident? (Score:5, Funny)
Do you realize I got blamed for that? Thanks loads, buddy.
I did something like that once.. (Score:5, Funny)
I made it to my location and up several flights of stairs.. plugging the UPS in with very little time left.
Later that night, some drunk asshole creamed a power pole and cut out power to the entire neighborhood for 5 hours.
The UPS just didn't last...
Overflame (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Worst computer accident? (Score:2, Funny)
Went back to the office, got my final check, and of course, didn't mention anything to the boss.
To this day, I still feel bad about it...
But not as bad as if you had told the truth ...
I let the wife read my Email (Score:5, Funny)
Low tech accident (Score:3, Funny)
It was cheap and the type where you punch out the 5/14 plastic drive bay cover from behind, but before you do that you have to remove a metal plate that needs to be removed by bending it back and forth until the metal fatigues. and snaps.
I decided that the best way to do this at the time was to insert my arm inside the case and wiggle the metal plate until it broke, from which position I could then punch out the plastic cover from the inside. The plastic cover was pretty flush with the case meaning I couldnt just jam a screwdriver in there from the front.
I underestimated just how sharp the interiors of cheap cases can be, and after pushing the metal plate at the bottom forward so it bent, my fingers slipped through the gap as the metal bent back, which then sprung back cutting into my fingers. My left arm was stuck in the case, (and naturally I am the type of guy who screws in the little screws on cables). There was no way I could get my arm out of the damn thing without removing the metal plate, and I couldn't get any leverage on it form inside without seriously cutting my fingers open. To make it worse I could feel the thing slicing deeping into my fingers which was starting to really hurt.
I had the thing stuck on my arm for about 10 minutes before the pain got so bad that I *had* to do something to get the thing off - I couldnt move very far due to the cables all being connected and routed through my desk, and the only thing I had to hand was a large screw driver. I started bashing the plastic front with the screw driver but couldnt get the damn thing off or get any purchase on it to prise it off. By this point blood is starting to drip from the bottom of the case and I'm thinking there is *no way* I'm going to be found having bled to death like this, and if I could get the cables off, I could picture myself embarrassed as hell in the emergency room with a computer stuck to my arm.
In the end I had to grit my teeth and force my hand further through to punch out the plastic meaning I could get my other hand in there to bend the metal away. Cut myself more in the process but it was wotth it.
Lessons learned from this are: 1. never screw in cables 2. push from the *top* as your fingers bend down not up 3. cheap cases can also cost you an arm or a leg, just not figuratively speaking.
Re:Mouse Pee (Score:5, Funny)
I think my sig says all that is needed...
Re:Worst computer accident? (Score:5, Funny)
Don't give him any new ideas.
Re:Worst computer accident? (Score:1, Funny)
1/ Bypassing sysadm tools and using "echo user:passwd:etc:etc:etc >/etc/passwd" instead of the more useful ">>" to append, AND THEN LOGGING OUT TO TEST IT. Hello, single user mode (and this was a production machine, not my home box).
2/ (actually a friend): Writing an install script which ran as root to cd to the installed package directory and do a recursive chown on all files. Accidently misspelt the directory in the cd so the chown worked from / down.
3/ The perennial favorite to get rid of all object files: "rm -f *
Posted as anonycoward to protect the guilty...
Re: " Open-XP " (Score:3, Funny)
Sorry, our warranty doesn't cover stupidity! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I can't believe he said this (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Being robbed (Score:5, Funny)
p.s. You might want to inform your friends that they should never turn your computer on or off... well your good friends at least.
Re:Cell Phone/Beer/Laptop/Vacuum Cleaner (Score:3, Funny)
Now if a wedding ring falls into the beer, it's fair-game for anyone in your party to call "1-2-3-dibs!" whereupon you are socially obligated to give them the ring and drink for keeps.
Worst Computer Accident (Score:1, Funny)
Repairman shut down the whole callcenter (Score:3, Funny)
On the way out after his service call the repairman hit the large red button on the wall next to the door thinking that it would open the door.
It wouldn't.
It would, however, instantly cut all power to the computer room in case of an emergency. That's probably why it was labeled in large red letters "EMERGENCY ELECTRICAL CUTOFF"
Re:The dangerous tool that is called dd (Score:3, Funny)
Re:On a similar note... (Score:5, Funny)
One of my instructors in a networking course had a five year old son (We'll call him Sammy, even though I don't know his real name). The instructor had been playing around with a Linux distro, and left the CD in the drive when he powered it down. The next person to boot up was Sammy. Something unfamiliar appears on the screen, and he asks his mom what to do. Mom, not paying attention, says, "Just click OK!"
Whoops.
The kid ended up installing a new OS and wiping out all my instructor's data.
Re:Mouse Pee (Score:4, Funny)
"Holy shit! I see a mouse wandering around inside the computer!"
Back in the mid 80's I had a job as a 'puter techo.
One day, I received a PC with the fault description "Dead"
It turned out that the PSU was shorting out when a mouse foolishly decided to take up shop inside.
I bagged the mouse, taped it to the top of the PC and filled out the repair sheet.
Under "Description of work" I wrote "Faulty mouse"
;-)
This one time.... (Score:3, Funny)
I stuck slashdot into my bookmark list...
My son's off too an early start... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:On a similar note... (Score:4, Funny)
Toasted Vaio, literally (Score:1, Funny)
He had hidden the notebook in the broiler of the oven, and she decided to do some baking. IT was at about 400 degrees fahrenheit for 20 minutes or so.
The case was badly melted. Many of the keys had stuck to the screen. The power button on the side had melted, but when he broke the plastic around it and pushed it in, LEDs lit up and it sounded like it was booting.
He got it to a desktop machine and connected an external keyboard and monitor. It worked fine. He copied the data to an external harddrive, but then continued to use that machine.
He told me the story and showed me the machine a few years after the incident, and it was still working fine.
I told him to let Sony use it in advertising!
somewhat unrelated (Score:1, Funny)
Re: " Open-XP " (Score:2, Funny)
HP Tech Support (Score:3, Funny)
We had a backplane on a 20 disk RAID array fail on one of our HP 9000 computers, so we had HP come in to do the repair. That night, at about 11:00pm, the HP tech lady shows up, with the new backplane. She removes the old backplane, and sets it down next to the new one and remarks how it's odd that the power and data connectors seem reversed.
Apparently, though, this doesn't phase her, so she puts it in anyways. I'm sitting there thinking "Hey, she's the HP tech", and say nothing. Big mistake.
Plugs everything in, powers on the system -- no lights on any of the drives. No spinning. Nothing.
After about 4 hours, she decides, after numerous calls to other HP tech folks and after I mention it a couple of times, that those connecters were indeed on the board wrong, and she's just fried all 20 of our 18GB disks. And we open for business at 6:00am.
By 7:00am, my boss showed up, as did another HP tech (who actually knew what he was looking at). It's determined that we can run, crippled, for the day off of our development system, which is a nearly identical mirror of our main HP9000. Later that day, the second HP tech returns with 20 brand new disks (free of charge!) and proceeds to ponder how to recover our data.
At this point, I'm pissed. The boss is pissed. The users are beyond pissed. So I tell him to just swap the circuit boards and be done with it. 20 minutes later, we were finally back up and running.
What a pain...
Re:Yeah that's why DOS was so great can't screw it (Score:4, Funny)
never never ever (Score:5, Funny)
a. mIRC open to FIVE cybersex channels
b. 7 different cyber PM sessions
c. odd streaks on teh monitor
d. puke all over the keyboard that had eaten away the plastic membrane (puke is ACID)
e. roomie lying face down on the keyboard in a puddle of puke with his dick in his hand
Suchetha
Re:I did something similar.. (Score:3, Funny)
Boy, I'm glad that safety in nuclear power-stations is better today!
A 50 foot Bush-zilla is the last thing the world needs...
Re:A solution to almost all liquid problems (Score:3, Funny)
That's why I love working where I am now. My company has actually piped water into a room right next to my office, and I can drink as much of it as I like!!
Pulled the wrong plug (Score:2, Funny)
Go to put in rails. Hmm.. These rails for a Sun V210 have a bit of extension past where the bolt onto the post at the back for cable management and it wants to touch that power plug. So I trace the lead from the plug to it's destination. Well, What do you know! It's powering the rack next to it. That's slack, so I lift a few floor tiles and I find a close power-point under the floor to power this rack.
I then dutifully ask everyone who has equipment in the rack if I can unplug their gear for a few minutes. "Yeah no problem" they say. The rack I wanted to unplug only had co-workers personal webservers in it, so that's was good. So I power down their boxes and pull the plug on the rack.
Something didn't seem right.
I couldn't pick it right away.
The room was quieter, or something.
I look over at another rack, the one full of expensive kit running important systems. It's off. It must have been the stopping of the constant whine of SMP machines with SCSI disks that alerted me to something not good. I had TRACED THE WRONG CABLE.
So I curse and curse some more. I plug the rack back in and hear a tone from the rack that I have powered off by accident. I see that it's still not on. I see the overload button on the rack has popped out. I curse some more.
I push in the button, machines start booting. I let go of the button, machines go off.
I push in the button, machines start booting. I let go of the button, machines go off.
I push in the button, machines start booting. I let go of the button, machines go off.
I comtemplate for a moment that I will spend the next 20 years holding in this button in quiet shame in the server room.
I am still there. My co-workers bring me slashdot on a laptop. Food sometimes.
No seriously, we lowered the load by switching off some DR and test/staging machines and moving their power around.
Anyway, I still have a red face and feel a bit shit.
In my defence, the cables did look the same and were tangled around each other.
But I am still a fool.
Re:spilling acetone on a sony vaio laptop (Score:3, Funny)
$thousands for violating Salvador Dali's copyright...
Re:Worst computer accident? (Score:3, Funny)
Linux will let root do any dumb thing with a computer that you could ever conceive.
Windows will do it for you automatically.
melting plastic (Score:4, Funny)
turned out that someone had decided to print some plastic bags in it..
plastic.
bags.
Suchetha
Re:Interesting thing about WinME (Score:2, Funny)
You can always get one from another country though.
ME Class (Score:2, Funny)
I clicked around and eventually saw an option that said "run system tests", so I figured why not, let's see what it does. Then a shell window opened and I read a few lines, one that said "shutting down systems".
Just then, I hear a girl behind me say "Oh shit, I didn't save!", and then a guy say "Oh my god, what's happening!?" I told my buddy to hurry up and save his work. He looked at me and realized I was the cause of the pandemonium striking the room and saved immediately, luckily his system hadn't started shutting down yet.
Soon enough, all systems in the room had been shut down, restarted, and then began running a series of self-tests.
I backed away from my system, pretended to be just as upset as everyone else, and casually got out of there. My buddy was one of four people in the class who had saved his work, while 21 others were out of luck an hour into their final. Lucky for him, my problem put his grade at the top of his class since most of the other students weren't able to finish in the time remaining.
If you were there... sorry, I didn't know what I was doing
Re:I bought a Dell. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:never never ever (Score:3, Funny)
A truly Priceless Kodak Moment
SB
Re:mkswap (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Worst computer accident? (Score:3, Funny)
Exactly
Re:never never ever (Score:2, Funny)
Now i will have to go beat my head against the wall to get the picture out of my head.