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

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

Took 'em long enough to figure out that an emergency shutdown feature is essential if your CPU can literally fry itself to death if certain conditions aren't met.
Hindsight 20/20, I know. But at that point it's already been years since heatsinks on CPUs became a requirement, so they really should've known better.

Yeah, they probably didn't think anyone would do that in the same way you are not expected to put your fingers in a light socket and turn it on. The computer space was exploding and the new and superior CPUs like the Athlon and P2 that really required heat sinks and fans were initially released in the cartridge format where it was already a pre-assembled part of the product. So I can both understand the mistake and reason for why CPU manufacturers didn't expect it be an issue. Unless someone was part of the enthusiast scene and pushing the limits all of these things were not as obvious as it is now.

 

[Vibe_Guy]

I tried to add a 8gb ram stick to my pc, the computer rejected the stick and promptly fucking died. It's fried. No saving it.

RIP old pc, you served me well.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

Backup scripts have been fucking up recently due to hardware changes on my work machine so I decide to redo them. This involves consolidating all the data onto a network share. There are 3-4 copies of the data in question, a 20GB folder with about 300K files in it. Since copying tiny files over SMB takes aeons I decide to locally dupescan them. A few hours later I get the result that they're all completely identical, so I wipe all but one of them.. only to discover that I wiped ALL of them because one of the copies was actually a hardlink to the directory I was intending to copy. Goddammit.

No data lost though since the previous night's backup went off fine, but it still took an extra hour to restore.

 

[Autistic Spergout]

For the past 2 years I've been having a tech issue which caused my pc to randomly reboot mostly occurring when I was playing video games and after I bought a 3080 but I couldn't fix it no matter how much I upgraded/replace parts. Upgraded my PSU thinking it was that, upgraded my motherboard (Needed to buy another just so I could put a spare cpu in another computer so that wasn't a huge issue). Looked up the symptoms which lead me to replace SATA cables to my drives as apparently they could cause the issue I was having. Constantly thinking that it was my gpu I take it back to the shop where I bought it from so they could test it. Without the 3080 in eventually ran into the same issue while running a 1660 Super so I go back to the shop and say that the gpu wasn't the issue (Genuinely felt like an idiot going back there after a day and being semi-annoying about this issue for 2 years)

I eventually had the thought the maybe it was the power strip I was using for my setup and that it was just getting old and becoming unstable. I bought a new one. While I was walking back from the hardware store with a new one I had a quick look at the power limit and it was rated at 2400w which I thought would be enough but it wasn't. I unplugged everything that wasn't necessary to my computer working. Still wasn't enough. So I bring out my other pc that I use to watch things in bed, everything is fine until I decide to install my 3080 into the spare pc the issue decided to come back. Getting annoyed at the situation I plug nearly everything back in and disconnect my pc and found an extension power cord and connect my computer to an outlet in another room which turns out fixed everything.

I fucking hate technology sometimes and did not suspect that I was using that much power and constantly thought that I had a major issue with how I built my pc or a defective part but I'm also glad that nothing died while this whole situation was occurring.

 

[Command Prompt Disabled]

Routinely use LVM encryption on Linux machines, fucked up the password by one key and had to reinstall the image. Then for whatever reason while using Linux Mint I tried to upgrade Python to a newer version and it completely broke the DE and uninstalled a ton of shit.

Probably the biggest one was using OmniDiskSweeper to erase the desktop folder on accident on parents laptop, lost their important work files. That was an interesting conversation.

On Kubuntu right now and nothing has happened so far, so there's that.

 

[glow]

Backup scripts have been fucking up recently due to hardware changes on my work machine so I decide to redo them. This involves consolidating all the data onto a network share. There are 3-4 copies of the data in question, a 20GB folder with about 300K files in it. Since copying tiny files over SMB takes aeons I decide to locally dupescan them. A few hours later I get the result that they're all completely identical, so I wipe all but one of them.. only to discover that I wiped ALL of them because one of the copies was actually a hardlink to the directory I was intending to copy. Goddammit.

No data lost though since the previous night's backup went off fine, but it still took an extra hour to restore.

In a similar vein, as a young sysadmin I once created a script to delete old call recordings in a PBX system. Unfortunately I left the script in the same directory where the call recordings were so it faithfully deleted itself. The company then couldn't receive calls for a couple of hours because it couldn't make new recordings due to having no disk space, and the alerting situation was fairly poor.

When explaining programming to non-programmers I use this story as an example of how a computer will do exactly as it's told, even if it's obviously not what you meant.

 

[PC LOAD LETTER]

I'm not sure if this counts - one day, I got a new stick of memory that by all accounts ought to have been compatible with my computer at the time. Clearly it wasn't, because when I stuck it in the slot and turned the power back on - BANG! - there was a dent in the side panel about the size of my northbridge chip.

 

[cheersbigears]

Rented out a scout hut for a weekend with some friends to have a LAN party. We spent about 4 hours swapping cables and frowning at the blank Civ V local multiplayer screen before we drove down to our local electronics store, where they told us that we needed a router and not just a switch for it to work.

 

[Trump's Chosen]

I opened my computer to clean it up and dropped chocolate from my mouth onto my gpu and like the animal I am, I scraped it off with my fingers and ate it. But it didn't taste like chocolate.

 

[glow]

Rented out a scout hut for a weekend with some friends to have a LAN party. We spent about 4 hours swapping cables and frowning at the blank Civ V local multiplayer screen before we drove down to our local electronics store, where they told us that we needed a router and not just a switch for it to work.

A switch will work if you don't need to route elsewhere (i.e. to the internet), just set static IPV4 addresses. Alternatively set up one of the PCs to serve as a DHCP server.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

Rented out a scout hut for a weekend with some friends to have a LAN party.

On that note, does it count as a tech fuckup if you rent a hotel room with a bunch of friends because you want to loudly play UT99 all night only to learn a couple years later that said hotel is a notorious gay swinger hangout and there was a reason you were getting weird looks when renting the room?

The only gay that happened that night was that I lost a big killstreak by falling off the side of Facing Worlds because the person sitting next to me projectile vomited and I reflexively jumped away from him and fell off my chair to avoid the puke.

 

[Tour of Italy]

I worked at a non-profit as a data entry guy with other duties and I accidentally did a recovery install of windows 7 when trying to fix a boot issue. We lost several months of our primary work and years worth of miscellaneous internal records.

It was actually a very character building experience when my coworkers insisted that I be the one to report it to our supervisor, who was out at the time. That was a harrowing phone call.

Luckily, the guy before me had a USB drive backup of nearly everything that was lost. No one asked him to make it, and he was not obligated to make the pretty substantial trip back to our office to give us the data, but he did anyway (this was before the era where sharing bulk data on the internet was relatively easy). I guess he just knew I had that look and took precautions.

Dude saved my bacon in the end.

 

[AmpleApricots]

Things like that was the reason for Intel/AMD adding temperature sensor and shutting down if it got too hot. This was years before CPUs were smart enough to regulate clock speed and voltages so they don't flogiston themselves.

I'm not sure if it's the first temperature sensor in a CPU ever, but the first one I saw was in the 68060 (mid 90s CPU by Motorola, last of the 68k line before it got killed off in favor of PPC) and it was literally a thermistor you could measure between two pins. (For those not in the know, the word thermistor comes from "resistor" and "thermal" in one word, a resistor which electric conductivity varies with temperature, if you know values with math you can calculate how hot it is) I don't remember/know how the early temperature sensors in the x86 world were done but my bet is "similar".

That the 060 had a temperature sensor (even if not directly accessible without additional hardware support) was interesting in itself because it was a CPU that could happily run with no cooling whatsoever. Since the 060 actually went into a lot of embedded things from mercedes to space rockets to fighter jets to missiles though, it probably was an useful feature.

In the consumer x86 world, you would get some CPUs that actually came with a heatsink glued to them from factory, looking like this:



Cheaper things would just have a direct warning printed on them:



It wasn't really new knowledge that chips would self destruct if they don't have a heatsink in the 00s, it's just that they'd die much quicker without.

 

[Manul Otocolobus]

For the past 2 years I've been having a tech issue which caused my pc to randomly reboot mostly occurring when I was playing video games and after I bought a 3080 but I couldn't fix it no matter how much I upgraded/replace parts. Upgraded my PSU thinking it was that, upgraded my motherboard (Needed to buy another just so I could put a spare cpu in another computer so that wasn't a huge issue). Looked up the symptoms which lead me to replace SATA cables to my drives as apparently they could cause the issue I was having. Constantly thinking that it was my gpu I take it back to the shop where I bought it from so they could test it. Without the 3080 in eventually ran into the same issue while running a 1660 Super so I go back to the shop and say that the gpu wasn't the issue (Genuinely felt like an idiot going back there after a day and being semi-annoying about this issue for 2 years)

I eventually had the thought the maybe it was the power strip I was using for my setup and that it was just getting old and becoming unstable. I bought a new one. While I was walking back from the hardware store with a new one I had a quick look at the power limit and it was rated at 2400w which I thought would be enough but it wasn't. I unplugged everything that wasn't necessary to my computer working. Still wasn't enough. So I bring out my other pc that I use to watch things in bed, everything is fine until I decide to install my 3080 into the spare pc the issue decided to come back. Getting annoyed at the situation I plug nearly everything back in and disconnect my pc and found an extension power cord and connect my computer to an outlet in another room which turns out fixed everything.

I fucking hate technology sometimes and did not suspect that I was using that much power and constantly thought that I had a major issue with how I built my pc or a defective part but I'm also glad that nothing died while this whole situation was occurring.

That's unusual, a typical circuit in a house is unlikely to be more than 2400 watts. Yeah, there are 3600 watt circuits, but those are typically only used for HVAC, stove, etc... I guess somehow the additional items you had plugged in, in addition to the PC added up to more than 2400 watts. I can't imagine how many watts your system must actually pull if you only had the essentials plugged in and it couldn't be driven by the circuit.

 

[glow]

I worked at a non-profit as a data entry guy with other duties and I accidentally did a recovery install of windows 7 when trying to fix a boot issue. We lost several months of our primary work and years worth of miscellaneous internal records.

It was actually a very character building experience when my coworkers insisted that I be the one to report it to our supervisor, who was out at the time. That was a harrowing phone call.

If it wasn't you, it'd be a crashed hard drive or a flood or some other shit. It's their responsibility to provide a process that includes backups. If one of my guys lost months of work and was following all my processes it would be my fuckup.

 

[Tour of Italy]

If it wasn't you, it'd be a crashed hard drive or a flood or some other shit. It's their responsibility to provide a process that includes backups. If one of my guys lost months of work and was following all my processes it would be my fuckup.

Looking back on it, I see it that way.

At the moment though, you still have to tell your boss you personally did something stupid, and it may not be the best idea at the time to say “well actually we need a better backup policy”.

We definitely did have a better backup policy after that.

 

[Cpt. Stud Beefpile]

It's been long enough I feel safe posting this:

Many moons ago I volunteered at a recycling place and saw a thing that looked like a very oddball tiny computer; turned out it was a really early-model Pi.

It sat on my bedroom shelf until I saw someone's wifi named "Free Porn" and thought it would be the funniest thing possible to plug the Pi into a portable battery and take it around town with my open WiFi network where you would log into "XXX 4 free" and get an animated .GIF of shock images on the shitty amateur server i coded.

Rinse, wash, repeat. Different name, different fake content. Harmless cheap laughs. Left it in a bush by a fag rally with the network name "DANGER GAY PLAGUE" and at least a couple people started looking for whose ass to kick.

Then one day a politically active friend insisted I come with him to meet a candidate and maybe get to shake the guy's hand.

It didn't end as badly as this guy because anytime I took my 'gizmo' out to a place I made a habit of sticking it in a plastic bag for weatherproofing and leaving it somewhere instead of carrying it around. Just in case. I caused quite a ruckus with "ICBM_TARGETING_BEACON" and my little habit saved my hide.

 

[spastic_bag]

Just had my memory jiggled and I remembered two more fuckups, one just kinda funny, another a bit scary, but ultimately funny.

First one: I was attempting to install an additional 4GB of RAM into an all-in-one PC, at a time when 4GB of DDR3 SODIMM RAM was inexplicably nearly impossible to procure. I had managed to find a store that was willing to get me a stick, and it came completely naked, no clamshell, no nothing, waiting for me just sitting out on the counter. I had to ask the clerk for a sheet of printer paper to fashion a little envelope. I get home, spend a lot of time opening the damn PC up, breaking a screwpost in the process, I stick the stick in, turn the PC on, still just 4GB of RAM registering. So there I am, crestfallen, thinking the damn thing isn't compatible or that the stick broke in transport, or that I had been duped. I turn the PC off, take the stick out, put it back in, still registering 4GB. So in a Hail Mary move, I attempt to swap the sticks; I unclip the original RAM, and it pops up at a 45° angle like a weird little erection. I sat there with the strange realization that I had not actually looked up how to install RAM in a SODIMM slot, not generally being used to laptops. It is then I learned that it is possible to stick SODIMM RAM into these particular sockets in a way that looks and feels "right" while not being actually inserted, held in place by nothing more than a rough card edge biting into plastic and the Universe's spite towards me. After fixing this fuckup, the computer proceeded to use every byte of that 8GB RAM for years until I yeeted it a week ago.

Second one: I was attempting to Frankenputer an email box for an elderly family friend from bits and bobs I had lying around, the primary donor being another friend's aging, retired PC that was reportedly being used as a cat perch by a grumpy old Persian gremlin most of the time, as the friend had moved onto laptops. I take the PC home, I perfunctorily blow some of the dust out of it, I plug it in all optimistic-like and BANG goes the power supply in a cloud of white capacitor entrails and orange fur. After hastily pulling the plug and reinserting all the escaped shit back into my asshole whence it came, I replaced the exploded PSU with another one I had, and the computer booted up like nothing happened, Windows XP with wallpaper of grumpy old Persian gremlin and all. I'm not sure what happened to that PC after stuffing it with the best spares I had, but I believe it served its purpose for at least some time before being replaced with yet another hand-me-down.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

For the past 2 years I've been having a tech issue which caused my pc to randomly reboot mostly occurring when I was playing video games and after I bought a 3080 but I couldn't fix it no matter how much I upgraded/replace parts. Upgraded my PSU thinking it was that, upgraded my motherboard (Needed to buy another just so I could put a spare cpu in another computer so that wasn't a huge issue). Looked up the symptoms which lead me to replace SATA cables to my drives as apparently they could cause the issue I was having. Constantly thinking that it was my gpu I take it back to the shop where I bought it from so they could test it. Without the 3080 in eventually ran into the same issue while running a 1660 Super so I go back to the shop and say that the gpu wasn't the issue (Genuinely felt like an idiot going back there after a day and being semi-annoying about this issue for 2 years)

I eventually had the thought the maybe it was the power strip I was using for my setup and that it was just getting old and becoming unstable. I bought a new one. While I was walking back from the hardware store with a new one I had a quick look at the power limit and it was rated at 2400w which I thought would be enough but it wasn't. I unplugged everything that wasn't necessary to my computer working. Still wasn't enough. So I bring out my other pc that I use to watch things in bed, everything is fine until I decide to install my 3080 into the spare pc the issue decided to come back. Getting annoyed at the situation I plug nearly everything back in and disconnect my pc and found an extension power cord and connect my computer to an outlet in another room which turns out fixed everything.

I fucking hate technology sometimes and did not suspect that I was using that much power and constantly thought that I had a major issue with how I built my pc or a defective part but I'm also glad that nothing died while this whole situation was occurring.

There was someone here in another thread with the exact same problem and I suggested getting an extension cord and put it on a different circuit/outlet in another room.

 

[biggacracka]

One morning as I was tinkering with my computer, I managed to plug a molex 4 pin connector backwards on a IDE HDD. as I turned the power on, sparks and magic smoke appeared. It was a pretty big HDD too at the time, my second if not my biggest and I just killed it because I wasn't awake enough and the plastic tab at the bottom of the molex connector on it broke, allowing me to force it backwards. Since this HDD was already hard to plug in, I didn't think for a second that I was not oriented correctly.