On Fri, 08 Jun 2007 22:55:56 +0000, Jeff Liebermann sez:
Oh, you wanna swap stupid hardware stories? Back when I started working for my current employer about 15 years ago, we were a small shop with maybe a dozen 386/486 boxes hooked up on a LANtastic network. At least once a day, the server would shut down, which, with LANtastic, meant that any unsaved work was lost forever because the application (usually WordPerfect) would lock up trying to access the drive on which it was hosted.
The server was located behind the receptionist's desk under the table where they had the fax machine. After some investigation, we discovered the problem: One employee who didn't like to bend down when she sent a fax would always kneel on the floor in front of the fax machine, and as often as not her knee would bump up against the rocker switch on the front of the server. Power off, there goes the network. She was always good about turning it back on, but not before the damage had been done.
Then there was the time our Christmas tree lights overloaded the same circuit our training lab was on, and I lost 15 hours of a data conversion project that had been running overnight.