I once had to tell a colleague that her breasts were pressing the space bar when she put an invoice in her processed tray. I don't know about dumb but it was embarrassing.

Shorted the center pin of a transistor in the numerical display of one of those giant build a stack game at Dave and busters. Literally the first thing they had me look at after starting, and that that no one could figure out, I was testing various points with a multi meter when it slipped and bridge two of the legs. At first I was worried a really messed something up, but the dude that had been there forever was like "what'd you do‽ It's working!". Definitely a fix I wasn't expecting.

"Power off, then on again." This was after a mystifying issue where the printer would do the invoice format and backgrounds, but refuse to print the text, and had a seasoned copier tech stumped. Still scratching my head on that one.

Easy.

When I was 13, we had an Apple IIc. My mother used to take the cable that connected the computer and the monitor to work with her so I'd focus on homework rather than playing Ultima IV.

But it was a monochrome signal. I straightened out a metal coat hanger and plugged it in... it worked just fine if you didn't bump it.

Removed the plastic film on a brand new phone when someone complained that the earpiece sounded bad during calls

I'm not sure if this counts because it wasn't intentional on my part, but... When I was a kid, my mom had a digital camera. The lense on it would extend when it was powered on, and then retract when it was powered off.

At some point the lense got stuck, which caused the camera to not turn on properly and made it useless so she ended up getting a new one. I had gone to take the old/broken one to mess around with it and accidentally dropped it.

Apparently the angle that it fell at was just enough to "lodge" the lense back into place yet the fall wasn't high enough to cause it to shatter or break. It worked perfectly after that, and while my parents were a bit upset they needlessly bought a new camera, they ended up letting me keep the old one.

(Later on I figured that was their way of justifying not returning the new camera that probably had nice new features or something)

I also vaguely remembering them saying something along the lines of "That's probably the only time in your life dropping a piece of equipment will actually fix it and was just luck - don't go trying that on other things randomly".

I stabbed a router with a knife twice and it worked. It knew I wasn't fucking around now.

I have a pixel 8 and had a faulty screen caused by poorly installed latches that held down the screen. Slapping above the power button seemed to fix it for about 20 minutes.

Somewhat related.

I was doing a winter mountaineering course in Scotland (not as epic as it sounds, but damn fun!). We had some pretty gnarly weather, and were practicing navigation in a whiteout. It's pretty easy to lose your sense of direction, there's no landmarks, no reference for what is straight ahead. So the lead person was trudging along, looking down at the compass, following a heading, trudging off into the blank whiteness in a straight line. Every now and then, they would start veering off to the left, then go back straight again- just enough to be perceptible to the people at the back of the line, but not to the person in front. We pulled up a couple of times, lead person kept insisting they were following the compass precisely. It kept happening, so we switched people, same compass, no problem.

It was only when we were back at the lodge and the original lead person was saying how much they loved their electric heated gloves that we figured out what the issue was.

Absolutely nothing. Works surprisingly often.

For starters I'm old enough that if your TV or monitor was fuzzy or blurry you gave it a good bang on the top. This worked 50% of the time and was considered common practice but it sounds stupid in retrospect.

But wait there's more: I boiled a demo disc (videogame magazines used to come with a disc of demos for new or unreleased games). During a particular print run of Official Xbox Magazine many of the shipped discs would skip or fail to read and dropping them into boiling water for about 30 seconds was a way change the refractory index of the plastic and fix something that was causing the laser to be unable to read them.

I guess this is my jam because that last one reminded me of another hilarious practice from that era: "Toweling" an Xbox. First generation hardware of the Xbox 360 we're prone to detecting an overheat and sometimes entering a state where they wouldn't boot up anymore and display an iconic "Red ring of death" where the LEDs on the front would light up red and it would it never finished booting. But it was running, just it wouldn't continue. While it was getting a little warm, it seemed to be more a failure of the sensor rather than a catastrophic overheating. So naturally the solution was... Get it hotter. Wrap it in towels blocking all of the fans from doing their job and get it hot enough that the sensor would seem to go out of range and reset itself. This returned it to normal operation for hours or days, for some people indefinitely. Fortunately I haven't "toweled" any electronics lately.

Needed to get a server back online when it's CPU cooler had failed

Found some random cooler for a totally different CPU, smeared thermal paste on it and zip-tied the cooler to the mobo and case as best I could.

That thing ran like a champ for almost 6 months till I got around to replacing it

chmod -R 777 *

My electric piano requires a very accurate punch in order to the A3 key to work again, I've even read in forums that is the ONLY WAY to fix it. Sounded dumb at the time but it was the fix.

Hard drive in the freezer. Broken actuator. Well, I put the entire laptop in. Early 00s probably. Worked for like 3 minutes.

When I moved recently my PC suddenly stopped booting.

Before transport I removed the GPU so the PCB wouldn't crack, but my motherboard was showing that it got stuck in the GPU check when booting, so I thought I accidentally broke the GPU by shocking it with static, or popping off some capacitor or something. I still wanted to rule out everything else before buying a new GPU though.

I kept replugging things, thinking it might be a connection that came loose during transport, I reseated the RAM, I tried just one RAM stick, I even reseated the CPU.

Turns out, somehow a CMOS reset fixed it. I'm still confused as to why that worked.

Dead PC.

Unplug PC.

Lick finger.

Stick finger against 3 metal bits where cord goes on power supply.

Plug in PC.

PC works.

Ran a hairdryer all night, propped against my Mac laptop keyboard after a friend knocked over a full pint of beer onto it.

The next morning the whole bathroom reeked of stale beer, the power bill was astronomical, and the left quarter of the keyboard never worked again.

Took it in for repairs and was grateful AppleCare swapped it out without a peep. This was a while back, before the embedded moisture strips that void the warranty.

Opened and revived a DOA GameGear by cleaning off the furry, green, PCB corrosion. Didn't have any Isopropyl around, so I used vodka.

Originally posted here, quoted below for convenience:

Real story.

I was in my late teens. My parents were dragging me to a tiny, kinda culty church every fuckin' weekend. Didn't really have much choice. (Hell, I hadn't even told anyone yet that I thought Christianity was 100% bullshit.)

I had a reputation for knowing my stuff about computers. (Because normies -- particularly boomer normies like Pastor Dipshit -- don't know the difference between programmers and PC support.)

So, one Sunday after the service, Pastor Dipshit asks me to look at his computer. His Outlook was giving an error dialog. Something about not being able to find an email on disk. Clicking the "ok" button just resulted immediately in another dialog, and while the error dialog was present you couldn't interact with the main window, so this rendered Outlook unusable.

Turns out he'd gone and deleted a bunch of files from the filesystem. Like by navigating from "My Computer" down to the directory where Outlook stored its files. Rather than deleting emails through the Outlook GUI the way one is meant to.

So, I mused "hmm, I wonder if it's just giving one error message per email that was affected." I could see in the window behind the error dialog that the total count of emails in his inbox was only a couple hundred or something.

So I commenced to clicking as rapidly as I could. Probably about a minute of clicking later, no more error dialogs and Outlook was usable again.

And everyone marveled at my "genius."

I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't learn his lesson and continued to delete random files from the filesystem, but he kindof lost what was left of his connection to consensus reality and scared even my culty family away and we quit attending that church not terribly long after that, so I couldn't say for sure.

Told someone to take their headset off their keyboard when help application kept appearing on their screen.

I had a router that I converted to a access point with openwrt, couldn't get vlan trunking to work, so I ran 3 separate network cables back to the switch and assigned each one to its own WiFi network

Turned it off ... and then turned it back on again. It feels stupid, but it fixes way more issues than it should.

Just thought of another one. I have an old Amiga 1200 which doesn't get powered up much but I accidentally dropped it in a move. Since then it's been prone to randomly crashing. Opened it up, nothing appeared to be dislodged. Somehow discovered that if I prop it up at an angle it doesn't crash any more.

I wanted to install an extra hard drive in my computer, but the power supply didn't have enough connectors. I actually had a spare power supply unit, but upon testing, the 24 pin cable was too short to reach the motherboard.

I ended up using both PSUs. Only one had a power switch on it, so that was connected to the hard drives. I had to use a paperclip in the unused 24 pin connector to make it output power. The 2 PSUs had a wire running between the ground pins of a random unused connector, and they were on the same phase circuit.

The hard drive PSU had to be turned on first at the switch. Once that was on, I could press the power button to turn on the computer. I think I used it for about a year before buying enough upgrade parts to effectively replace the entire computer.

Individually press all the Shift, Alt and Ctrl keys.

This was back in the Windows 95 days and persisted for quite a few versions. The symptoms were that when typing you'd get accented or no characters, basically Windows thought one of the keys was held down. It happened more often than you'd think.

After troubleshooting and rebuilding a pc of a customer back then 6 times , reinstalling it , changing all cables , checking every single hardware connector for damages and they were all pristine , no tools showed errors or anything.

Put the ram into another pc to check it , pc did boot fine , checked no errors , put the ram back in the other pc and pc boots , no issues , 7 day long term test no issues at all.

Idk what it was till today , don't forget I had rebuilt the pc multiple times prior the ram just worked after being in another pc , I even took it a few times out and put back to make sure that the clamps are OK and connector and it wasn't just luck nope , worked every single time afterwards.