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

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My favorite story is a guy who put a dongle into his work computer which had an executable that somehow managed to hijack the entire work network and install Linux on every single computer. It wiped out about three day's worth of work for the entire company. He was mega-fired.
 
I once put a board in a benchtop toaster oven to "reflow" dry solder joints. I checked it and thought it needs another minute or so.

I came back to basically a puddle with some components floating in it dripping through the racks of the oven.
 
Wrote a bash script to periodically check several servers for a slew of information.

Accidentally fucked up the timing (bash can be confusing) and before I knew it a bunch of servers all around the world were DDoSing my rural network connection.
Took down the neighborhood entirely for a day
 
Years ago I regularly used CCleaner not even believing the FUD about "needing to scrub your registry" and such, it just felt really good to hit Delete on a big list of "cruft".
 
Nothing crazy but a couple of years back I went about modding my childhood PSP with custom firmware. When I went into the root of the device directory to drop the necessary files into it, I noticed there was an unopened .zip file already there from a decade ago.

Turns out I'd tried to mod the PSP when I was younger after getting crazy excited watching custom PSP videos and my young brain thought I could drop the .zip file in there and hey all done. I must've turned it back on, got confused why it didn't work and decided it was too hard and just gave up.
 
Back in 2007, i reinstalled XP on a hard drive that i had music collected since the Napster and FTP days. Since like 1998 that I’ve been downloading music. Some was given to me from certain underground groups that i listened to back then.

It wiped out my music collection and was able to piece 80% of it i had backed up on cds that I burned. The rest, i either don’t remember or can get back.

Also lost years worth of photos. Some of the lovely lady that would become my wife.
 
When I was a kid (second grade?) , my teacher let me mess around on her Mac because I was rather tech literate for a child. Went to check out the properties on her Home drive, accidentally created an alias.

"Wtf is an alias?!?"

Panic set in; in my haste to remove the alias, I deleted the Home drive instead of the alias. We all learned a bunch of valuable lessons that day
 
I remember accidentally breaking a striped RAID array once. It was a fucking nightmare and took me and Paragon software literal days to rebuild the array. Wasn't fun!
 
I once partially bricked my PC by forcibly shutting down it at like...5 AM in the morning while it was installing an update because I just wanted to sleep and not care about it. Come the next morning and my computer was bricked, but I did at least get it to work by replacing my corrupted RAM carts with some lower quality 8 GB ones. Had to get a fresh reinstall of Windows 10 on it to get it fixed.
 
Flabba Wabba Jabba said:
I did this with a laptop of mine from a few years ago. Tried nearly 100 passwords until calling Dell support, spending 3 hours proving to them I was the owner of the device, then them issuing a key that's supposed to overwrite the password (glowie backdoor technology) and even that failed.

Ended up waking up in the middle of the night with the correct password and unlocked it lol.
Click to expand...
Dear God, I'm bad with passwords since I have so many accounts for various things.
 
Computer related... when I was 11 or 12, my dumbass put a bunch of magnets on the side of my computer tower one day, and when I tried to fire it up, it wouldn't boot.


Recently, on my old school honda, I did a compression test without first unplugging the coil pack on the Dizzy. Fried the ignition module and coil pack and had to Uber to work for 2 days until my Chinese knockoffs came in the mail. Worked on cars for 20+ years and still did this amateur mistake.



Another time was me being a cheapskate and not buying a surge protector and lightning hit the power line in front of my place or something because all my power went off, then my TV reset. It worked fine for the rest of the night. Next day I try to turn it on, and it has audio but no video. The X axis or whatever the motherboard is called for it was discontinued, and the used parts were like $150 each USED and for some reason was recommended to buy both sides.
Shame, I really liked that old school samsung TV with the big ass glass cover over the screen. Had it for 20 years in the family and it treated me well. Beat many games on it.






Shadfan666xxx000 said:
>shorted my phone when it was wet by screwing in one of the screws while it was on
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Bro I didn't buy a case nor screen protector for my new to me iPhone 11 at the time. Dropped the phone and cracked the screen, then pulled it out and texted someone while walking in the rain. Sometimes I'm retarded.
 
- Fried the HDMI port of a Wii U by plugging in a dodgy HDMI to VGA adapter
- Knocked over my Wii U gamepad and it fell off the couch, somehow breaking the screen
- Threw a Galaxy Xcover 4 in a swimming pool because I thought it would be fine (It wasn't)
- Went in the shower with my Galaxy S5 because apparently I didn't learn my lesson the first time.

I do not have a good history with tech lmfao
 
When I decided to try out Pop OS, I thought that it would be a good idea to choose the disk encryption option when installing Pop. I used a 8 character passphrase for a strong password and just assumed that I'd constantly pull out my notes app (Where I stored my encryption passwords. Hey, it's easy alright) and put in the password. After an hour and a half of pulling my hair out with Pop, I got everything I needed set up and decided to reboot (I do it because it's cathartic knowing you can finally just blow everything away after fucking with something for a while). However, I unfortunately deleted the note containing the password for disk encryption because, in the settings of Pop, I changed the user password for my account and that that would affect the password for disk encryption (???). Lo and behold, I am prompted to put in a password that I don't have and I am forced to restart from scratch. Then, after doing it again, I realized that Pop OS fucking sucks and just went back to Linux Mint. Three hours I'll never get back and a realization of how fucking retarded I am.
 
in my first month of using linux (Mint), i was messing with some packages trying to compile something that needed a newer version of glibc (?) and i thought i could just update it by manually replace the files on the fly. as soon as i moved the old files everything started breaking down. suddenly thunar stopped working, xfce stopped working, it was a mess. the live ISO and (iirc) busybox really came in handy.
 
My first laptop was running low on space. I saw that Internet Explorer was taking up half my space. I used Chrome, so I deleted it.

Now I know that Internet Explorer contains critical system files and I essentially deleted System32.
 
Once I was using my father's computer and changed the screen resolution. Whatever I chose wasn't compatible with his monitor, so it just went black - and I panicked and started hitting keys, including Enter. Which meant I accepted the change. He was out of town and I can't really if I was really supposed to be using it.

My solution was to go to school the next day, and write down all the steps from startup to accessing the screen settings and changing the resolution using only the keyboard. I was very proud that this worked, but thinking I had ruined my dad's computer was one of the biggest "oh fuck" moments of my childhood.
 
lichen said:
Once I was using my father's computer and changed the screen resolution. Whatever I chose wasn't compatible with his monitor, so it just went black - and I panicked and started hitting keys, including Enter. Which meant I accepted the change. He was out of town and I can't really if I was really supposed to be using it.

My solution was to go to school the next day, and write down all the steps from startup to accessing the screen settings and changing the resolution using only the keyboard. I was very proud that this worked, but thinking I had ruined my dad's computer was one of the biggest "oh fuck" moments of my childhood.
Click to expand...
I think Windows up until 8 used to have a "boot in VGA resolution" mode in F8/safemode menu that resets it to 640x480, letting you change it if you fucked it up.
This reminds me that some custom ROMs on my old phone used to have buggy brightness slider that when being set to 0% would completely disdable backlight. You could use ADB to control the screen over USB and set it back to working value, but if you're outside when that happens, you're fucked.
 
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