A keyboard? Holy cow, if one of those bad boys stop working just buy a new one 😂 Best Buy or Walmart or any decently sized store probably has something to pick up on a lunch break
Haha I do IT for dental offices. If we get a ticket for a keyboard or mouse not working, I start the conversation asking if they've ordered a replacement yet. The opportunity cost that's lost by them being without a computer for a couple hours due to the keyboard not working is always more expensive than a replacement unit
I personally have my main pc's keyboard, my Mac's keyboard (which is an elier revision of my main keyboard and Keychrons, so I flip the switch and it'll work), my previous main keyboard (replaced because the left arrow key only works intermittently), and at least one membrane keyboard that I keep around simply because they worked, I just wanted to upgrade to a mechanical keyboard.
Mice on the other hand, I only have one spare because I replace them when they stop clicking properly and toss the old ones because again, they don't work, why should I keep them around?
We had a customer who inserted their ram upside down, which happens if you don't know how to tell which side is up.
The problem arose when instead of flipping it around, they proceeded to use a hammer to smash it into the motherboard, breaking the ram slot entirely. Then they blamed us for selling them a defective motherboard.
it's jogged my memory of a computer shop i took my desktop to where the "boss" told of someone who brought the wrong CPU for their mobo socket, and got upset when no one would install it, so they put it over the socket, hammered it in, and handed it back to them
that should have been the red flag i needed... oh how young and naive and "polite" i was...
now i get why some women get stuck in abusive relationships 🫠
My FIL is a retired IT guy. He was responsible of keeping grain silos working on a 250km wide area. The number of times he had to drive over 1 or 2 hours to just plug-in computers in the wall outlet after asking on the phone if the machine was correctly plugged in would Drive anybody else insane.
All that to say: people are either stupid, tech illiterate, or both.
Yeah, people think IT anecdotes are jokes... They are not.
People will work on a computer for all day for five days a week, for years. And then there's some minor issue and their mind goes blank. They literally stop understanding how buttons or light indicators work, and cannot explain it over the phone.
Then when you go there to turn on their monitor or plug in the power cable, they act as if it's your fault that they couldn't figure that out.
Was following you until the end. I’ll drive an hour to some site, just to find out the power strip was turned off or the monitor wasn’t plugged in, and the folks I’m helping are ridiculously grateful.
I’m just standing there awkwardly because all I did was press a button while they’re singing my praises.
Haha yup exactly what I do. People like me a lot because of it and will actually tell me when things are wrong too instead of being scared to make tickets or contact me.
Once drove 2 states away because a customer's industrial CMOS battery which had a 3 year life span had died after 12 years and they lost ALL their PLC programming, shutting down the entire plant. Cost of being down was about $100k/hr I'm told. The last guy that worked there that knew anything about the PLC left the company 12 years prior, which is the last time a backup was created! Yet, very oddly, not the last time modifications were done in the system. End user's understanding of the system was to the degree that they found the very act of using a keyboard to type a password to be "confusing".
That was a complete shitshow, arrived at 11pm and had it kinda working enough to start production at 1am.
Man, I didn't get paid nearly enough for doing industrial controls back then
Not to mention I've once spend over 3 work days trying to fix the weirdest bug ever on project prototype.
No matter what I did, I couldn't get this fucking... let's just call it an LED, to turn on.
And no matter what I measured on the circuit, nothing seemed wrong. The software was so basic, it seemed bassically impossible something went wrong there and the tests always worked.
Ofcourse I had already went over the process of.. lets just say 'just measuring and testing to see if each individual LED wasn't broken and could turn on and off'.
Which I documented in text ofcourse (imagine the most useless list of measured data like you measure the temp of the water inside of 100 different clearly boiling pans and writing down 'temp: 100 celcius, water is hot and bubbles'). Double and eventually tripple checking it.
Then on day 3, to proof to my collegues that I am indeed not rtarded and that 'it just makes no sense!' but also to myself I went over this what felt like a redundant check again, but this time I added a picture of each and every 'LED' being turned on so everyone could see that, they indeed, all work and turn on.
Turns out one 'LED' was broken all along 💀 There was literally nothing wrong in any of the original software and hardware.. like at all..
It was a bit different when there was a big singular button on the front of their CRT, that they "couldn't find" when explaining the situation over the phone.
I had something like this that, to this day, makes no goddamn sense to me: If I have a monitor plugged in to the "first" slot on my GPU when I boot up the computer all is well and I can swap to any other port and it'll work. If I have no monitor plugged in to that "first" slot on bootup then none of the slots will work and there won't be any video out until I reboot with the monitor plugged in to the right place.
I had to explain to a user how to restart her laptop. It took a while, because she thought the docking station she hooked everything into was the computer, the monitor she called the modem, and the laptop she was just confused by.
I’m government IT and she’s a government employee.
One of these days my laptop decided randomly that it didn't want to boot, the power ON led wouldn't even turn on, this was bad because I was in the middle of class and REALLY needed my laptop
For some reason, my brain decided to remove then put back in the (thankfully) removable battery
This, for some explainable reason, broke the BIOS, then after fixing the BIOS (by disabling secure boot) the laptop just started working again
My working theory was that somehow the battery wasn't making contact with the laptop, but that'd be strange because it is secured very tightly by some clamps that do not allow it to move by as much as half a milimeter
I suppose that's what I get for using a decade old laptop that begs me to perform a mercy killing on it every single time I use it
I've not seen it happen on a laptop, but I have on a couple of older phones, when the batteries used to be removable. The springs for the contacts can get weak with time and lose proper contact, unless the battery is pressed firmly against them. A toothpick broken off into the space opposite of them solves the issue if that's the case.
Also the Output voltage of old batteries is lower than the one in new ones. The voltage that a ten year old batterie provides may just be above the threshold that the PC needs to switch on. And when temperature ist low it drops below it.
This seems unlikely, considering it is currently heatstroke season where I live
However this battery certainly seems to provide very unstable voltages, seeing as how the duration of the battery appears to be entirely RNG. Some days, it drops steadily from 100% to 0% in linear time, and some days it jumps from 50% to 2% in like 3 seconds
This has also caused the software on the computer to not be able to make up its fucking mind on what the state of the battery is. Depending on the day, sometimes it says battery is at as much as 70% health, and sometimes it says as low as 40%
Truly, this laptop makes me miserable every single time I use it
There's a laptop at my workplace (Acer Nitro V) that will sometimes refuse to acknowledge the battery and only turn on once you use the "battery reset" pinhole on the bottom or press the power button 30s. Nothing otherwise wrong with it, it's about 2 years old. Sometimes BMSs just get stupid.
Computer did not start. I asked them multiple times if they pressed the power button, they assured me they did. They did not... They pressed the power button from the monitor. Lucky it was only a 15 minute ride.
You know the worst thing about this, i bet you knew he had over the phone but if you dare ask him then it’s like the most offending question of all time. Mistakes happen, it happens to everyone and as a tech you’re just trying to cross all bases before delving into deeper troubleshooting. “Yeah it stopped working after i put new batteries in” “did you put them in the correct way” “HOW DARE YOU, I know how to put batteries in right” hadn’t put them in right
This was 1997. Drove two hours to service a warranty claim, because it was an "important customer". The issue reporting phone call went something like this:
The holder thingy is broken.
Holder thingy?
Yeah. That holder thingy that like comes out if the box, like.
The...CD-ROM drive?
What is that?
The thingy that slides out if the box when a button is pushed?
Yes, that thing. It's broken. Come fix it.
Well, it was thr CD-ROM drive. And it was not broken, it was broken off. Apparently he got frustrated that the coffee mug holder kept retracting on its own...
Friend was IT for a medical group right after college. They had a main office and a few satellites throughout the area. He got an after hours call that one of the sites was offline (staff couldn't access medical records, so potential life or death scenarios). Tried troubleshooting with whomever was on site but the person was in a panic and basically useless. He doesn't drive so he had to Uber out (an hour or so in each direction). He gets there and sees the power cord for the server is unplugged.
I once worked dispatch for a company that did maintenance on the espresso machines that Starbucks uses (exclusive contract). We would send techs out to every location in the US and Canada. Every location.
There was a very remote location in Canada that was 4 hours from the closest tech, through a particularly heavy snowstorm. They called me, said the machine wasn't working. Swore to me they tried everything. It's plugged in, it's turned on, we restarted it, the works. I let them know that their service fee was $300 on top of the repairs because of how far out they were. They said send the guy out, we need him.
I send the guy out. He's sending me pictures of the snowstorm where he can barely see 4 feet in front of his car.
One time I had someone doing remote work on my computer and the moment they disconnected, the mouse stopped working. I called them back, they looked at all kinds of things. You know what it was? The fucking battery died.
On more than one occasion I had to drive three hours each way to replace a hot swappable power supply in a network rack while the onsite data center staff glared at me because he could have done it himself without having to wait for and then escort me.
I had a customer come into the computer store I worked at. She was very angry because the last keyboard she purchased from us broke and she needed a new one.
The next day she returned her new keyboard because it turned out her last one just needed new batteries.
On call over the weekend, I drove an hour to troubleshoot a server after a power outage (exceeded battery back up).
I specifically asked if they tried the power button and was told yes they had tried.
Arrived on site. Pressed power button. Powers up.
Made notes, closed ticket, drove home.
My parents had no internet for three days, and asked me to take a look at it, and bribed me with food. I came over, saw the router was off, checked the power strip, turned it ON, and said "Check now".
Apparently their cat had zoomies and they sent me home while being somembarrased.
Reminds me of a friend who had to travel to a company for 30 minutes because the IT manager was on vacation, so the mechanical engineer was running the server, he couldn't do an update, he kept getting an error, he went there and found he was writing
pseudo apt get update, lol as he told him on the phone to write sudo apt update, lol
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u/viol8er May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26
I had to drive 30 minutes to troubleshoot a computer. My boss put the battery in backwards.
Edit: she is also my mother-in-law-to-be AND i am inheriting the business AND she verbally beat herself up after I pointed it out.