What's the funniest incident of technology failing you or someone else that you've heard of?

it can be from any time frame, not necessarily recent. Once I find an incident, I get to relate it in a way that could have been prevented, how it affected the company, and what to do now to prevent it from happening again.

Well, there was the time I worked at the high tech company, on the production like, repairing the computers that failed diagnostic tests during their construction. We would assemble them, run them through tests, test them for 24 hrs hot and cold, etc.

I had a computer that I had been attempting to troubleshoot for an hour, when most took me a few minutes. I would be looking for the cause of one problem and it would exhibit a different problem. I was getting a little frustrated at the elusive nature of the problems.

There was this lovely, young, buxom, Tahitian lady, Lola, who would do soldering and changing of components. We got along fine. She enjoyed my sense of humor.

I said, “Lola, I think this computer just needs a hug.”

She got up, a little slower than normal. Se walked over to the computer, pressed her chest up to the front panel, and gave it a nice hug.

It passed all the diagnostics after that.

During a demonstration of Windows 98 by Bill Gates and some feeb, it crashed

thanks filmfann, I ended up using the recent DOS attack on twitter’s server. I thought about the windows 98 crash though.

Yes, definitely talk about Twitter and how they have no control of phishing tweets.

My brother’s computer crashed 1 day before registration for classes. We were also on vacation, so he couldn’t go to a friend’s house. He ended up going to an internet cafe and missed a day of fun at the beach.

My husband has a meltdown because of our computer at least twice a week.

When I use it, it’s fine. When the kids use it, it’s fine. As soon as my husband sits down in front of it, it freezes up. Nothing works. He can’t click on anything, or the screen saver won’t shut down, or he gets that “This program is not responding” error. He has a lot of patience with people, but inanimate objects seem to make him flip out in ways that have me hiding in the other room trying not to laugh out loud. He’ll start with, “What the…why does this only happen to me?! Come on you censored… Why is everything that’s supposed to be simple turn into a nightmare? I swear to God, I’m going to throw this thing out the window in 30 seconds. insert more swearing here That’s it, I’m going to punch this censored thing.”

He goes on like that for a while, gives up, and then starts raving again when I sit down in the office and the computer runs smoothly. Honestly, I think he has some sort of brain waves that interfere with the computer functioning. He doesn’t see anything funny about it, but it cracks me up. Especially when the kids come in and all talk about how they each used it and didn’t have any trouble, just rubbing it in.

Computers always used to go haywire when I was around. I didn’t use them, and I didn’t even like them. I wasn’t allowed in our home computer room, because everytime I walked in the door, the computers would all go wonky.

It’s not quite as bad since we got our service on the cable, and I have been using my laptop for about three years.