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

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Worst that comes to mind is I was changing VLAN settings for new security cameras. New and old stuff would be on different VLANs. I had 8 different switch web GUIs open and I accidentally changed settings on the backbone switch. There was a ton of radio chatter because I took down communication for a lot of phones, factory automation, and computer network with one bonehead move.

I realize what I did and I'm panicking. I think I'm going to get fired. I remember I made back ups a week ago. Saved! Nope! The file share is on a network drive on an affected network. I then remember I have a thumb drive in my locker with backups.

I run to my locker on the other side of the plant. On the way, I slip on a pile of fat and fall into what is definitely not mud. I work at a slaughterhouse btw. The head of maintenance is laughing his ass off at me slipping in shit and blood. Four people try to stop me about their emails or something. I harness my inner Chris Chan and shrilly yell back, "I'm working on it!" I manage to do a file restore on the switch. Everything starts to come back. We're good!

My boss comes into the IT office. I had been an IT technician for all of 2 months and thought he was going to fire my dumb ass. I explained what happened and called me a fucking retard and don't let it happen again. I somehow still work at this place.
 
I don’t know that I’ve ever had a major tech fuck up that I can think of off the top of my head. That is to say I’m certainly no tech expert by any stretch of the imagination but I know enough to know when I’m in over my head, and generally speaking if I don’t know the answer to an issue I can often figure it out on my own without much trouble provided it’s something I can look up.
 
Magicicada_septendecula said:
Since then any unnecessary drives are removed before any OS install.
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Built new machine nine years age. Connect my 120 GB SSD boot drive and 2 TB mechanical drive for data. Install Windows and everything's great for six years.
Eventually, the 2 TB drive is whirring loudly, but not ticking yet. Time for a replacement. Install 3 TB mechanical drive and copy data. Verify files are readable on the new drive . Shut down the PC and remove the dying 2 TB drive. Hit power; no boot.
The genius coders at MS thought it prudent to put the reserved and system partitions on the SSD and the recovery partition on the 2 TB drive. Had to play with the partitions on the new drive and finally figured out that clonezilla could recreate the recovery partition on the new drive.

My personal tech fuck up:
Just replaced the PC above after nine years of service. Install windows on the nvme, no other drives connected. Update and start reading KF on second PC. Turn back, see the screen is off and proceed to install two SSDs. As I reached to flip the swithch on the PSU to turn it on, I brushed the mouse and the screen come on showing the Windows desktop.

"Hmm the PC's been on the whole time, ehh?"
It was my DarkSydePhil moment.

No damage done thankfully.
 
Fell asleep working and recorded a video on Telegram, in a mobile developers' chat no less (who would know how to get it out of the app's cache once deleted). I didn't even notice when I'd given it camera permissions (could've been anytime, my phone is old but relatively expensive and for that reason unrooted). I wish it had a low-level safety switch: bam, no camera/mic whatsoever.

I had disabled camera on my laptop immediately after I got it, following some Top 10 Windows Tips I found online, and couldn't turn it back on when I needed it for remote work three years later. Tried everything except reinstalling Windows. Turns out it does have a safety switch.

And a win: I had an interview for a computer repair job. They gave candidates a quiz with questions like "what color wires are there in a RJ-45" (which I got right) and a bunch of "select all processors which are compatible with this motherboard". I'd never built a PC and didn't know the first thing about it, but it was a paper quiz, so I wrote across the sections, "DO NOT TRUST YOUR MEMORY, ALWAYS CHECK SPECIFICATIONS". Got the job.
 
Back in 2010 one of my siblings had a Macbook Pro whatever the smallest one at the time. Me and another sibling was looking at a car speaker and noticed that it would switch off the screen (Like you were closing the laptop) and my other sibling wondered what would happen if we were to place the speaker on the opposite side of the laptop. Well that little fuck up fucked the HDD rendering it unusable and with the reasonable cost of Apple to replace the drive for around $500 for 160gb

When I had a HP laptop whenever for some reason I needed to take it apart I would gain or lose a screw. I really don't know how or why so don't ask.

I built my first desktop in 2013. I put it all together but it wouldn't POST so after 3-4 hours worth of troubleshooting I realized that I didn't plug the SATA cables into my disc drive and SSHD.

In my most recent build I've had a few issues with my desktop rebooting and I thought it was an overheating issue so I bought an AIO CPU water cooler. When I was cleaning my Ryzen 9 5900 (That was about 2 months old) of thermal paste to install the water cooler I bent a pin and someone asked me why did it looked I was about to cry less than 1 minute after I bent the pin all I could say was "I think it's fucked" in a shaky voice as I didn't have the money to replace it nor buy another CPU. I sat down for a bit and realized that I could easily bend the pin back into place with a steady hand. Still working but fuck me I'm glad AMD removed the pins from the AM5 CPUs as I would rather destroy a motherboard than an CPU
 
Autistic Spergout said:
When I had a HP laptop whenever for some reason I needed to take it apart I would gain or lose a screw. I really don't know how or why so don't ask.
Click to expand...

I had a laptop like this. Over the years I took it apart many times and each time I ended up with "leftover" screws. The laptop must have been held together by true belief at one point since there is no way any more screws could still be in it.
 
Manul Otocolobus said:
I had a laptop like this. Over the years I took it apart many times and each time I ended up with "leftover" screws. The laptop must have been held together by true belief at one point since there is no way any more screws could still be in it.
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Speaking of screw related fuck ups:

I had a Lenovo Thinkpad x130e that I took apart to replace the hard drive in it with an SSD. For some reason they decided to use two slightly different length screws for the bottom panel and I didn't notice and ended up screwing one of the longer ones in under the palm rest until it made a protrusion in the plastic. I guess I just didn't notice the increased resistance in the screw going in or it was just thin cheap platic.
 
Oh, I just remembered a reasonably inexpensive, but still annoying fuckup.

I wanted to mount my TV to the wall, and I bought some brackets. I had a conduit plastered into the wall, and when I mounted the TV, the opening was still a bit visible, and the brackets were screwed into the TV as high as they would go without showing over the top edge of the screen. So I take them to the garage and chop them with an angle grinder, screw them into the TV, mount it, the hole in the wall is now completely exposed. I had cut the wrong end of the brackets.

That was a frustrating ride back to the store to get new ones.
 
Manul Otocolobus said:
I had a laptop like this. Over the years I took it apart many times and each time I ended up with "leftover" screws. The laptop must have been held together by true belief at one point since there is no way any more screws could still be in it.
Click to expand...
Happens to me a lot too, I just ended up buying a set of like 200 miscellaneous screws off ebay so I always have some on hand.

A while ago I took apart my laptop to re-paste the CPU, clean up the fans that kind of thing. All went well, put it back together and for some reason the trackpad wasn't working, I plugged in a USB mouse and was desperately trying to figure out what the fuck was wrong with it when I discovered the speakers were also not working. After much troubleshooting and stress I finally discovered that I just forgot to plug the trackpad and speaker ribbon cables back into the mobo when I put the laptop back together.
 
When I was replacing the CPU one of the pins snapped clean off while in the socket. It wouldn't ve been such a problem if you could at least grab on it, but it snapped in such a way that there was nothing to grab onto.
Solved the problem by pushing the pin all the way through with a thin sewing needle (Socket 478's construction allowed for that).
 
IamnottheNSA said:
When I was replacing the CPU one of the pins snapped clean off while in the socket. It wouldn't ve been such a problem if you could at least grab on it, but it snapped in such a way that there was nothing to grab onto.
Solved the problem by pushing the pin all the way through with a thin sewing needle (Socket 478's construction allowed for that).
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Depending on the pin you might not actually need it. There's a guy I linked earlier that cut off random pins on CPUs to see what happens, he had a chart of what different pins did though.
 
Smaug's Smokey Hole said:
Depending on the pin you might not actually need it. There's a guy I linked earlier that cut off random pins on CPUs to see what happens, he had a chart of what different pins did though.
Click to expand...
Yeah, the old CPU kept working after that, despite it not being one of the ground pins. The problem was that until I found a way to push the stuck pin through the socket I couldn't put in the new CPU that I wanted to replace the old CPU with.
 
Lose: Way the fuck back in pre-Internet history i dead-shorted a keyboard lock and fried a motherboard, which were not cheap or easy to replace.

Win: Figured out that my schools network security (windoze 95/98 ) was so piss-poor I could 'login' by hitting ESC or clicking cancel. This let me try out new proxies, check which game/porn sites were currently past the filters and leave random textfiles all over the entire district....and none of it was logged under my student username.
 
- forgot to add insulators on screws that attached motherboard to my case, added too much thermal paste to cpu, both on my first build
- thinking Ubuntu would partition itself when I was 14 and wiping the hard drive completely, but at least it stopped the boot loop problem because Windows was completely gone lmao
- somehow bricked a later mint install on a laptop a few years later by trying to install Toshiba NIC drivers according to instructions
 
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