Slashdot Mirror
10 Computer Mishaps
Ant writes "ZDNet UK posted Ontrack Data Recovery's 2004 list of the 10 strangest and funniest computer mishaps... Some of them are funny!" My best mishap was installing the alpha video driver on an NT 3.51 box thinking that it was just an alpha driver. Of course since this Alpha meant DEC and this was an x86 box, the server barfed pretty hard. Also the time I spilled an 8oz glass of water on my laptop and lost all my email from 1994 to 1999 and my backup was corrupted. That I liked too.
Hey, freezing a broken hard disk works, really, just don't do it like this.
These really aren't very good but hopefully people will send some better ones in.
My personal ones:
A friend in the office had to install identical 2 machines with linux. Step 1: Install linux on one machine. Step 2: Install the hard drive from other machine into the computer. Step 3: 'dd' one disk over to the other one. Step 4: Scream as you did it the wrong way round and overwrote your newly installed disk with blank disk garbage.
On a server I needed to remotely manually replace libc with an older version file from another machine. Ofcause you have to remember to do everything in a single command otherwise if you delete the old version you cannot run anything else. (I am sure there must be a simpler solution to that than take the disk out and do it on another machine)
Leaving a computer under the desk but pushing it back as far as it would go so the back board of the desks fully covered the fan hole. It got very hot after a day and then burned out the cpu and powersupply in one go.
Inserting a K6-3 into an older board which I didnt want to replace. The board had jumpers with markings for the CPU voltages 3.1, 3.0, 2.9, 2.8, 2.7 and followed by 2 unlabelled jumpers. The chip wanted 2.6v core supply (I cant remember the details) so foolishly I assumed the other two jumpers were the lower voltages for which there were no processors at that time. I was wrong and a puff of smoke appeared as my lovely new 450MHz executed its first and only operation.
Checking if the IDE cable worked itself loose without moving the computer from its place and leaving it turned on. So I am reaching round the side and blindly feeling around for the cable and I suddenly feel something like an electric shock (which turned out just be accidentally touching the cpu fan blades). I very quickly remove my hand snagging it on one of the many sharp pieces of metal sticking out of old cases. It was quite cool to be able to see my muscles moving around as a huge piece of skin flopped open exposing the tendons in my hands.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
One man became so mad with his malfunctioning laptop computer, he threw it into the toilet and flushed a couple of times.
It must have had problems dumping his log file. It was probably stuck in the backside cache...
A man with a gun is called a citizen. A man without a gun is called a subject.
Not to sound like a miserable bastard, but exactly which of these are supposed to be funny? This article is really lame, uninformative and about as funny as colon cancer.
/. going downhill>
The first item on the list takes the piss out of some guy for putting a HD in the freezer in an attempt to get it to work, when that is well known for sometimes working in temporarily resuscitating dead drives, if the death is due to a mechanical fault.
Also, the link for page two seems to keep taking me back to the first page in Firefox.
<insert misc comment about
Bah. Humbug.
Remember that time when Taco tried to revamp the slashdot login system and none of the stories had comments for like half a day? Ahhh, memories...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
This is a Commodore 64 user I knew. He got around to reading some computer books, and remembered the phrase "you must format a diskette before you use it". Guess what he did first when he decided to use a commercial program that was on a diskette?
Beer and keyboards don't mix. I spilled nearly a pint on mine and its tough working with it now. I won't give it up because its one of those old IBM keyboards and I just love it. But man its tough typing without arrow keys, a backspace and some letters. Reminds me of that Simpsons bit:
Marge: You know Homer, the "E" doesn't work on that typewriter
Homer: We don't need no stinkin' "E"! Ok, "Food Box: Go or No Go" by Homer..no, Earl..no, Bill Simpson!
Delete from Users; where ID=1;
Fleur de Sel
I really would have expected Taco's story to be about "the one time we updated Slashdot..."
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
How could I forget yesterday so quickly? Do we really have that many Memento-style disabled Slashdotters?
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
One day, frantic call from my friend: "can you come with me to $AIRPORT, $AIRLINE's mac is down (I was the Mac expert then). Seems that $AIRLINE is running it's whole fleet management software on ONE computer.
We get there, and the VICE-PRESIDENT OF FINANCE is waiting for us at the receptionist desk. He hands my friend a $50,000 cheque!!! We go look at the macintosh, and I cannot do anything, the hard-disk is totally molten...
We get out of the airport and rush to the bank to have the cheque certified.
The next day, $AIRLINE filed for bankrupcy...
When I was 12 or so I bought a 2400 Bps internal modem for my Compuadd 486 SX25.
:)
I had no idea what I was doing so I called up the Hayes support line. I told the support guy I wanted to install my new modem but needed help.
He asked me if I had my computer's case off, to which I replied yes. He then told me to go ahead and plug the modem into one of the free slots.
Zap! OUCH! Poof!
He neglected to tell me to turn off the computer.
Hey, I was 12... leave me alone.
For those of you who are worried, some how, both the computer and the modem survived and I eventually got it installed and working.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I don't know about that article being funny, but I knew a guy in colleg who woke up to a random dude pissing in his keyboard. I'm not sure if the keyboard was ruined, but I do know that it was trashed (much like the random dude). Cops were involved and the guy ended up having to buy a whole new system for my friend. So if you're in college and you're not locking your dorm room door, you might want to put a towel or something over your keyboard at night.
Mark A. McBride -- OmniNerd.com
The worst/oddest I've seen went something like this:
/.)"
1. Someone ran rsync with -r at the end, intending to do something recursive. This option was treated as an argument, causing a file called -r to be created. This was done in / on an HP-UX workstation.
2. Two years later, someone wrote a script to be run from cron that would run as root then change to a directory containing data files, erase them, and create new ones. This directory of data files was NFS mounted on the workstation in 1 above. Many, many other filesystems were also mounted on this workstation, all rw, all as root.
3. Some time after that, someone rebooted the workstation. Not All of the NFS mounts came up, so when the script in 2 ran as root and did not check to make sure the destination directory existed, it was not able to cd and ran in /
4. The script executed "rm -f *", intending to delete the data files. Unfortunately, the file called -r was still in / and was included in the argument list. Rm of course interpreted this as an option, so the command became "rm -f -r (everything else in
5. 3 and 4 happened on a saturday night when no one was around, so no one noticed all of the data disappearing until Monday, when it was all gone.
6. Several people had a very, very long day. Actually, several long days. A few weeks, actually.
Can you count the number of gross and avoidable administration mistakes, boys and girls?
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
I have to agree with first posters... these aren't very good stories. But, thinking maybe it's phishing for better stories, I'll byte:
I once created an extremely complex script, crafted lovingly to do something at the time I'm sure I thought important. As always I incrememtally built and tested, assuring myself of one more self-anointed masterpiece. Finally, finished, as an afterthought...
I inserted a variable to point to a directory node below which I would clean up all of my work (even though I knew I had no need for the variable and would never tweak it). It was such a simple addition. No need to test.
Fired up the script, it ran a couple of seconds, I was prepared to enjoy the fruits of my labor. Hmmmm, I don't remember ANY of the test runs running so long. Why is the hard drive light flickering so much? And why still? And why so long?...
Yeah, the
command worked perfectly. Except I defined the variable initially as: cleanupdir=dirname
So, everything was lost except for the frigging "masterpiece".
Undaunted, (I'm no idiot, golllll!), I calmly inserted the QIC backup tape with my prerun backup.
No, wait!, I'll not be caught with that error again! I quickly edited the only remaining file in my tree of files, the offending script and smugly fixed the rogue spelling. I hadn't been working in this industry this long without knowing how to take safeguards!
Now, twenty minutes later, my script fixed... my files restored... let's try this again. Yeah... something about the chronology of fixing the script, then restoring the broken version over it from the backup tape. At least I proved the error was replicatable. So, I am an idiot afterall!
disclaimer: this happened over ten years ago, so I'm a bit short on exact detail of the snafu, but it really did happen. And, even though I repeated my idiocy, the fact I had the backup tape at all with only the one error to fix in the script saved my butt... so not all was lost in the lunacy.
After he pulled the pipe out of the pump I distinctly remember 'hearing' the sound of water hitting a fan followed by 'seeing' that the pump was pushing water upwards-straight into my graphics card fan which was very effectively 'flicking' water over the rest of the PC.
PCs are hard to break, and after 2 days drying out it worked fine.
NB: this happened three times and after the third time and the purchase of my x800 xt I moved back to fans
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
When I was in university (1985-88) I worked in the computer lab and my buddy and I were asked to take a look at one of the secretary's PC that had a floppy drive that was acting up.
Rather than try to diagnose the problem at her desk we usually just replaced the drive and checked it out back at the lab. We removed the existing drive and plugged in the replacement. Because the floppy mounting was rather tedious we didn't completely mount it until we were sure it worked so my buddy held on to it while I powered up the machine.
Now what I haven't mentioned was that the power plugs in this particular brand of PC did not have a "notch" on them like modern PCs and we weren't paying attention to it so when we plugged in the drive we put the power plug on backwards.
When we powered up the machine smoke began pouring out of the floppy drive as my friend began screaming, "Turn it off, turn it off!".
When we realized our mistake we got a new drive and installed it correctly. When we left, the secretary (already cautious of computers) was now almost terrified by the PC on her desk.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
OK this story isn't exactly technical nor was it that costly, but it is true and stupid and kinda funny.
A few years back when I was into doing computer mods, I had recently put together what I though was a pretty great rig, a BP6 with dullie 433mhz overclocked to 500mhz each, with dual golden orbs, 16mb voodoo card, etc... so this was done awhile ago...
Anyway after finishing my master piece, I notice it was housed in a beige box. This simple would not do! So I spend a lot of time designing a custom case design. It involved special glossy paint, three sepreate masking jobs to have overlaying geometric inverse colors (Silver and Black mostly), and fitting my computer handle (that I have used for the last, oh 15 years or so) into the design also inversing the lettering as it crossed geometric boundries (only one). It also took several coats. Anyway very complex and well thought out (or so I thought).
I was all proud of my rig, and when one of buddies came over I made sure to show it off.
His ONLY comment was 'Who is "DartVain"'?
Working tech support, guy dumps entire glass of Orange juice into his IBM Thinkpad. It won't boot, and he wants me to fix it over the PHONE. He was obviously scared to death to tell his boss he trashed a 2K dollar notebook. When he FINALLY sent it in, it took two people to yank the battery, as it was glued in place with crusty orange juice
Again, tech support. Salesman's laptop comes in won't boot. Reason: buggy porno screen saver. We remind scared, contrite salesman "not to install unapproved software on company machines."
Worked in a power plant for a few years. Tape drive caught on fire from being caked with coal dust. While it was still flaming, I grabbed the drive by the parallel cable and whipped it into the middle of the parking lot where it could burn without catching anything else on fire.
Also in the power plant. Guy calls in to say his monitor is "rainbowy". Turns out the CPU underneath the monitor is filled with coal dust which clogged all the fans. The CPU was burning hot and was cooking the monitor. I literally burned my hand on the CPU case.
We had a support contract with HP, who was charging us upwards of 100 dollars for replacement network cards (this was years ago, but was still excessive.) We were testing some machines with 3Com cards we got at Best Buy, even though if HP found out, they wouldn't support those machines. One day, the ENTIRE network goes down. Nothing will bring it back up, until someone happens to yank the power strip connected to the new machine with a 3Com network card in it. The network IMMEDIATELY comes back up. I don't know why a 3Com network card would bring down an entire network, but it DID.
This isn't a mishap, at least not for me. I was initially hired to be an operator on the company's HP-3000. Within about a week, I had written automated scripts to literally do 90% of my job. The rest of the time I just looked at web pages and slept. I figured out that I could lie down by my desk with a screwdriver and sleep on the floor by my CPU. If anyone came by, I just started removing screws from my CPU case like I was working on it. I was behind two locked doors, so I had plenty of time to react when I heard the door latch. I loved that job. The computer mishap here was that they were paying me.
A few years back we had an intern in named Dave. Not a very bright fellow, I might add. We tasked him with installing Linux, Windows and other software onto various desktops we use around the office. At one point he came across a desktop with a faulty hard drive.
For some reason he thought he could repair it, and so he proceeded to open the hard drive up. None of us were there to witness it directly, but somehow he managed to get the very strong magnets close to his penis. They stuck together, crushing a portion of of the bottom of his manhood.
So he rushed in, blood all over and crying, and we were dumbfounded. We got him to the hospital, and then we couldn't help but have a good laugh over his folly. He returned for about a week or so after he recovered, but left soon after that.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
However, this is a very interesting cockup, and the author wrote the story well:
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Freezing will not help with a head crash or key sectors going bad. But there have been cases where it works. Back in the early 90's there was a problem with many Quantum-brand drives called "stiction", where the platter would not spin up after having been powered down. An internal lubricant (or adhesive, I forget which) basically got slightly runny when the drive got hot and re-solidified a bit out of place when cooled. This provided just enough friction to prevent the low-torque motor from being able to spin the drive up. Sometimes just rotating the drive quickly by snapping your wrist back and forth would do it. Freezing is another technique that worked (sometimes a combination of the two).
bp
I saved a cow-orker's ass by crank-starting his Seagate that had the same problem.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
On one job I was approached by a programmer who calmly said he was having problems with his monitor. As I approached his cube, there was black smoke pouring out of the back of the monitor and the top of the monitor was on fire. After grabbing an extinguisher, unplugging the monitor and putting the fire out, I found out he had put a blanket on top of the monitor to "keep the dust out".
At another job, I had spent a couple of weeks installing fiber optic routers and cabling to all of my servers. Turned it all on, configured the networking, and was congradulated by my boss for a job well done. Less than 24 hours later, I was showing the higher ups the new hardware when we heard a cracking noise and smoke came rolling out of the cabinet with the routers in it. After putting out the fire we found that an old IBM mainframe (Model 3033) we were going to remove soon was to blame. The bottom of the coolant reservoir had rusted out and dumped a few hundred gallons of water under our computer room floor. The water pooled under the router cabinet and shorted out the socket that the cabinet PDU was plugged into. We later found out that the spot that the cabinet was placed over was originally going to have a drain there that was omitted during construction. That was a quick $100,000 down the drain (pardon the pun).
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Twenty-or-so years ago, I was a young airman maintaining the Transportable Ground Intercept Facility-II (TGIF-II) at Metro Tango, a site located about 10 klicks north of the former Hahn Air Base (now Frankfurt-Hahn International Airport) in Germany. TGIF-II was used by Air Force and Army intelligence operators to intercept communications from the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. The operators sat at "collection positions," computer keyboards used to "gist" (transcribe in shorthand) the transmissions they listened to through their headsets.
One morning, as the operators entered the facility and began their pre-mission checks, an Army E-4 sat down at Position 11, close to our places at the maintenance terminal. He didn't look well, and sure enough, within a few minutes he promptly barfed his breakfast onto the keyboard in front of him.
He apologized and we said hey, no problem, get yourself to sick call dude and we'll clean up the mess. Thanks to mil-spec, the WWW III-grade circuit board under the keypad only required a quick rinse in the sink and a few hours to air-dry before it was reinstalled and the position checked good.
One of our civilian contractors was ex-Army, and when we told him the story, he got pissed and said "That guy did it on purpose - he's trying to get kicked out." We looked at the contractor in disbelief. Why the hell would anyone do something like that? But we were Air Force guys and had no clue to what lengths some people will go to escape the Army.
The next day and another mission, the operators filed into the facility and took their places to begin their pre-mission equipment checks. The same guy sat down at Position 11, looked at the terminal for a minute, and blew chunks into the keyboard. The kicker was the little grin on his face after he deposited his stomach contents into the keyboard.
The guy apologized again (still with the grin on his face) and excused himself from the facility. We disassembled the keyboard, washed, rinsed, dried and re-installed. To his credit, they guy didn't eat much either morning.
We don't see the operator for several days, but within a week he returns, sits down at Position 11, and within three minutes regurgitates on the keyboard. This time, we tell him to get the hell out and then we call his duty section. We explain what's happened and tell them since they keep sending the guy back to work, it's THEIR turn to clean the abused circuit board. They send a warrant officer (I guess he was the only technician-type the Army had) to whom we hand over the circuit board.
The next time I see the E-4, he's on the site's Goon Squad, folks assigned to jobs outside the compound while they await administrative or disciplinary action. He's driving the military-issue Volkswagen 9-passenger van used to shuttle workers between the site and an overflow parking lot a quarter mile down the road. It's winter, there's snow on the roads, and my boss, an Air Force master sergeant, and I are on our way to the main base to run errands on our lunch hour. The E-4 slams the van into gear, hits the gas, and power-slides down the small two-lane road, fishtailing back and forth as my boss yells at him to stop. I'm sitting in the back seat and in the rear view mirror I can see that little grin on the E-4's face.
Looks like our contractor was right after all. . .
What?
That was the worst, lamest, most pathetic computer list I have ever read. That's something my wife would forward (mechanical engineer).
Here's a much better story: my inlaws called in yet another computer-induced panic. Sis was crying, mom locked herself in the bedroom, and dad was in a frenzy yelling at us about his computer and wanting us to come fix it (a four hour drive). The problem was that the computer would not print and the home phone stopped working. We politely told him that we weren't going to travel 8 hours to fix his printer, and he really needed to call the phone company about his phone line.
2 days later the phone guy showed up and unplugged the printer's USB cable from the phone jack.
I originally heard this story from Art during a lull in a seminar on programming implementation when he was a visiting professor at the UofU. It is the best story I ever heard for proving than no good deed goes unpunished. It is also, the funniest computer story I have ever heard.
Stonewolf
Read on....
Subject: Always Mount a Scratch Monkey
Date: Wednesday, 3 September 1986 16:46-EDT
From: "Art Evans"
To: Risks@CSL.SRI.COM
In another forum that I follow, one corespondent always adds the comment
Always Mount a Scratch Monkey
after his signature. In response to a request for explanation, he replied somewhat as follows. Since I'm reproducing without permission,
I have disguised a few things.
My friend Bud used to be the intercept man at a computer vendor for calls when an irate customer called. Seems one day Bud was sitting at his desk when the phone rang.
Bud: Hello. Voice: YOU KILLED MABEL!!
B: Excuse me? V: YOU KILLED MABEL!!
This went on for a couple of minutes and Bud was getting nowhere, so he decided to alter his approach to the customer.
B: HOW DID I KILL MABEL? V: YOU PM'ED MY MACHINE!!
Well to avoid making a long story even longer, I will abbreviate what had happened. The customer was a Biologist at the University of Blah-de-blah, and he had one of our computers that controlled gas mixtures that Mabel (the monkey) breathed. Now Mabel was not your ordinary monkey. The University had spent years teaching Mabel to swim, and they were studying the effects that different gas mixtures had on her physiology. It turns out that the repair folks had just gotten a new Calibrated Power Supply (used to calibrate analog equipment), and at their first opportunity decided to calibrate the D/A converters in that computer. This changed some of the gas mixtures and poor Mabel was asphyxiated. Well Bud then called the branch manager for the repair folks:
Manager: Hello
B: This is Bud, I heard you did a PM at the University of
Blah-de-blah.
M: Yes, we really performed a complete PM. What can I do
for You?
B: Can You Swim?
The moral is, of course, that you should always mount a scratch monkey.
There are several morals here related to risks in use of computers. Examples include, "If it ain't broken, don't fix it." However, the cautious philosophical approach implied by "always mount a scratch monkey" says a lot that we should keep in mind.
Art Evans
Tartan Labs
Actually, though I'm sure you're correct in some cases about the cold helping with a malfunctioning temp. sensor in the drive - I think the freezer trick also sometimes just works because of defective IC chips on the controller board portion of the drive.
(Every IDE hard drive actually has the drive controller electronics bolted to a circuit board on the bottom of it. That's why the "IDE interface" is such a basic thing on your PC, whether it's integrated onto the motherboard or is a seperate PCI card. Most of the real work is done on the drive's electronics.)
With some malfunctioning electronics, you can manage to keep them working properly as long as you keep them cold enough. (One of the old tricks for troubleshooting bad parts in TV sets and the like was to selectively spray them with a can of compressed air, chilling them temporarily.)