Your personal tech fuck ups - This can't possiblly go wrong.

A tech fuck up that I personally saw:

Chinese coworker installs MATLAB and encounters her first ever IDE, complete with the current directory on the left hand panel. She was confused about why her photos folder was showing in MATLAB, that doesn't make sense, I need to delete that. Wait, my documents folder is here too? Delete.

She worked all the way to the root ("I don't recognize any of these files") before realizing that something probably wasn't right. By that point she graphically rm -rf'd everything on her machine. She left work to visit the Genius Bar™ and went back to doing her math in Excel.
 
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Most of my fuckups range from: "I should read the manual, but screw that I don't need a manual" and then waste several hours trying to fix a thing which was stated on page 2 of the manual to the rare (but painful) "what could possibly go wrong". The latter of which I still remember quite fondly.

A few years back I accidentally short circuited a fairly large capacitor and it blew right in front of my face. All of its internals spewed on my shirt and I lost hearing for about a minute. This happy little accident made me a bit more careful around live circuits.
 
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Not personal but relevant. There is an Australian youtuber that does tech videos, I don't know if tech channel is the the right description, he buys old crap, gives it a surface clean and boots it up to poke around the OS a bit. Doesn't add anything interesting or insightful as far as I can tell and videos are pretty vapid overall.

Anyway, did a recent video on one of those Microsoft surface things, tried to do a teardown to demonstrate the inside and broke the screen. What a dumbass.
 
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I have broken countless electronics while trying to clean them. Compressed air is hell of a weapon.

I once bought a new PSU for my PC in preparation for installing a new GPU. Somehow it managed to burn half of my motherboard internally. To this day, I have no idea how. The mobo was some cheap chinkshit Foxconn from a prebuilt. From that moment, I try not to install expensive PC components on my own.
 
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I once watched a girl from my computer lab class take out all the capacitors, resistors, and basically everything not PCB out of a desktop for a CompTIA A+ desktop disassembly and reassembly test. I never felt so sad, disappointed, disgusted, and amused in my entire life. She dropped out not too long after. She was also one of my coworkers and managers so she never heard the end of that story from me. Lots of funny shit happened in that class, but thats the only "fuck up" other than maybe the time someone "coined" someone elses monitor from across the room, breaking the monitor, and nobody knew who did it cause it was just this tiny ass disc of metal that someone yeeted at the monitor from the unknown.

EDIT: It was an All-In-One, not a desktop, I know its irrelevant but it wasn't irrelevant to the fact that we had nothing to replace that computer with, not even a case to fill with spare parts.
 
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Gatdam Animal Person said:
More like one of our reptilian brain's reflexes, touch hot thing, arm goes woosh type. The bulb was a CFL one, I don't think I can be shocked since there's no filament inside.
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Oh, okay, thanks for clarifying. Just thought it was unclearly worded initially and wanted to be sure, because it could be in either sense of the term.
 
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Rebuilt our first computer with parts from an old school pc. Worked fine playing RTCW like the good old days but then the old psu decided to fry everything. Blew up with blue electrical arcs inside.
 
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Lusotropicalismo said:
A tech fuck up that I personally saw:

Chinese coworker installs MATLAB and encounters her first ever IDE, complete with the current directory on the left hand panel. She was confused about why her photos folder was showing in MATLAB, that doesn't make sense, I need to delete that. Wait, my documents folder is here too? Delete.

She worked all the way to the root ("I don't recognize any of these files") before realizing that something probably wasn't right. By that point she graphically rm -rf'd everything on her machine. She left work to visit the Genius Bar™ and went back to doing her math in Excel.
Click to expand...
>MATLAB
I hate that rancid piece of shit software. Bloated but at least some of the tools you can manually download instead of downloading the entire toolset all at once.
 
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Ok, the shame has worn off enough to share this story. When I buy new laptops, I like to pull the factory installed drive and set it aside so (if required) I can RMA the machine without sending back a disk full of personal data. When I do this, I replace the drive before the machine is even booted for the first time. So, about a year ago I get a new laptop, crack it open, and go to pull the NVME drive. I've done this many times before, and the NVME drives always worked like this:

ssd-m2-socket-raised-position-1280x853.jpg
Where the socket is spring-loaded and the drive "pops up" when you undo the screw holding it down. Well, with this new laptop, the drive didn't pop up. "Ah, it must be stuck! Maybe some double stick tape on the back. I'll just lift it a little and..." I pried the socket loose from the motherboard. ::headdesk:: Turns out, unlike every other NVME socket I'd encountered, this laptop's socket was not spring-loaded, and now I'd fucked it up before it had even been booted for the first time.

I tried fixing it by pushing it down again, since all the electrical connections were still ok, it's just that the socket was no longer flush with the mainboard, it held the NVME PCB too loosely. All kinds of random data errors when trying to use the drive. Eventually fixed it by stacking little squares of cardboard on top of the socket, about 5 thick, and then forcing / screwing the backplate back down on the machine. The cardboard keeps the socket pushed down enough to work. Shockingly, it's been functioning reliably for months.
 
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pylosurf said:
Ok, the shame has worn off enough to share this story. When I buy new laptops, I like to pull the factory installed drive and set it aside so (if required) I can RMA the machine without sending back a disk full of personal data. When I do this, I replace the drive before the machine is even booted for the first time. So, about a year ago I get a new laptop, crack it open, and go to pull the NVME drive. I've done this many times before, and the NVME drives always worked like this:

View attachment 5525743
Where the socket is spring-loaded and the drive "pops up" when you undo the screw holding it down. Well, with this new laptop, the drive didn't pop up. "Ah, it must be stuck! Maybe some double stick tape on the back. I'll just lift it a little and..." I pried the socket loose from the motherboard. ::headdesk:: Turns out, unlike every other NVME socket I'd encountered, this laptop's socket was not spring-loaded, and now I'd fucked it up before it had even been booted for the first time.

I tried fixing it by pushing it down again, since all the electrical connections were still ok, it's just that the socket was no longer flush with the mainboard, it held the NVME PCB too loosely. All kinds of random data errors when trying to use the drive. Eventually fixed it by stacking little squares of cardboard on top of the socket, about 5 thick, and then forcing / screwing the backplate back down on the machine. The cardboard keeps the socket pushed down enough to work. Shockingly, it's been functioning reliably for months.
Click to expand...
You can't just not share pictures of your creation.
 
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I typically develop my personal projects on a laptop for the sake of mobility, and the last one I bought a couple years ago was the highest-end model, which had a Xeon processor in it. I thought this was going to be awesome, but the thermals are just not there, and it is constantly throttling.

Another time I was doing service on a computerized piece of warehouse equipment, which had to remain on to provide power to another piece of equipment, and my buddy asked for a tray of screws to start putting this thing back together. I pass him the tray, and end up spilling about half of these screws right on to the powered-on communications board, causing the whole machine to post. We had to shut it down, and rerun every test before finding out by the grace of God I did not fuck it up.
 
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