What's your craziest troubleshooting story?

[RecyclopsReveng3]

We've all spent time trying to fix a problem with our tech. But we all know that sometimes, it takes a little longer than we anticipated. Sometimes...just sometimes...it takes so much time that it actually causes you emotional distress. I want to hear about those times. 

For me, it was right after lightning struck a power line next to my house. This was kind of a double layer situation. First off, I was stupid, I didn't have my PC plugged into a surge protector so that fried. It sounded like someone shot a 12 gauge off right next to my window, and instantly a ball of blue light shot out of my PC and that was it. One of my monitors also fried. My TV fried, the TV in the living room fried, our cable boxes fried, modem, router, everything gone. And then my brother says to me "Oh my God dude my alarm clock fried!". Shut up Alex, I just lost my most prized possession and you're freaking out over a $10 alarm clock you bought from CVS. ANYWAY, the weeks following the lightning strike, I got a new PC built, insurance replaced everything in the house so that was nice. However our internet connection was awful. We had received a new modem from our ISP, we got a new router, but our connection was incredibly slow and unstable as hell. It would sporadically cut out during the day, sometimes it would be down for hours on end and when it was working the speed was around 5Mb/s down and 1Mb/s up. It was horrible.

 

Our ISP sent out a technician who installed a new modem, and the problem persisted. Plugging directly into the modem showed a crap connection so I know it's not my router. I call my ISP again, and another technician comes out. This happens about 25 times over the course of 6 weeks. Roughly 15 different tech's offered me zero help. They kept promising to run new cable's and do this and do that and they were all empty promises. Until they sent over an angel of a tech. This guy hung out at the house for almost 4 hours. He checked EVERYTHING. He pulled me to the side and said look man, I checked and there's a massive amount of interference in your connection. He said that my connection was reading as if my entire neighborhood was feeding off my connection. He stars investigating and comes back with nothing. He tells me that he's going to send over one of their "professional" networking techs to figure it out. Another 3 weeks goes by until that technician shows up. So now it's been months of no internet, so no gaming with my friends. 

 

The expert tech shows up, and we start talking. He tells me he has all of the info from the other techs and that he has no idea what the problem is. So he decides that he's going to inspect every inch of every cable that's running through our house and that's he's also going to replace every piece of equipment on our ISP's side. He's outside for a bit and he calls me outside. He says "I found the problem and I've never seen this before". He walks me to the side of my house and show's me a coax cable that runs from the cable box on the side of the house, down the side of the house to the back of the house into the basement. He walks me to the fence on the side of the house and what had happened is that during the lightning strike, that cable had snapped and soldered itself to the metal fence. My mind was blown and so was his. He was taking pictures of it and sending it to the other tech's. After months of stress my guy found the issue. Never in a million years would I have guessed that that was the problem.

[Zyb3rWolfi]

I wont call this crazy however very annoyin. So right bascily i plug in ma mouse into the pc however the mouse didnt work even though the rgb was on and at that time my keybaord didnt work.

 

so 1 day later ma friend gave me a keyboard and i started to see what the problem. it was a pain to go through device manager but at last i found the prob. For some FLIPIN reason my pc changed the original driver to Just USB Device Driver So i had to re install That and guess what a week later ma keyboard stopped working and the same thing happened again. However this is now fixed but ti was pretty annoyin to fix it

[tech.guru]

many years ago when I was doing end user support. I had an intersting issue where the user was trying to burn a disc and drive wouldnt recognize the media. I thought the drive needed a firmware upgrade to recognize the media (common at the time).

 

However when I opened the disc tray I saw the user was putting the disc in upside down. ever since I never assume anything

[RecyclopsReveng3]

7 minutes ago, tech.guru said:

many years ago when I was doing end user support. I had an intersting issue where the user was trying to burn a disc and drive wouldnt recognize the media. I thought the drive needed a firmware upgrade to recognize the media (common at the time).

 

However when I opened the disc tray I saw the user was putting the disc in upside down. ever since I never assume anything

Speaking of disk's, remember when your internet came on a disc? The good ol' days. 

[amdorintel]

crazy t/s story

 

if all else fails, unplug everything and let it heal on the healing bench for 24-48hrs