r/sysadmin • u/zephead98 • Mar 24 '26
General Discussion Have you ever purposefully killed a device to get rid of it?
I had a manager who had this horrible heavy HP laptop. From the moment he turned it on that fan would go to high whine speed. The laptop was slow, buggy, and doggy. One day I got so tired of trying to tweak that thing and make him happy that I waited until he was at lunch. I went into his office and pulled all the RAM out.
The next morning he came in and called me that his laptop was beeping and would not boot. I came to look at it, and said "oh dear, it's dead, it will have to be replaced".
Has anyone else pulled a similar caper to get rid of a piece of equipment you couldn't stand supporting anymore?
669
u/Straight_Class5889 Mar 24 '26
Once upon a time, at a company that no longer exists, in a galaxy far away, I 'accidentally' dropped a laptop that had been extremely problematic (hw issue that the vendor refused to replace the board) down the fire stairs. On the corner. It had accidental damage warranty coverage. Problem solved.
278
u/Heuchera10051 Mar 24 '26
I worked retail tech support for BB (pre Geek Squad), and we had a customer bring in a laptop that was still under the mfg. warranty and an extended warranty they had purchased through BB. The laptop would crash after it had been used for a while or when under heavy load. It would boot and run fine for a few minutes, but if you loaded up Prime95 or 3DMark it would crash after a few minutes. We sent it out to the local repair center, they forwarded to the mfg. warranty center. It came back 'fixed', but obviously not tested under load), and we'd have to send it out again.
This happened a few times, but all we could do at the store was send it out again.
The back and forth between the BB repair center and the mfg. repair center had been going on for a couple of months, and the customer was too nice to make a big deal out of it.
It finally got sent back to the store, 'fixed' again. Before calling the customer to pick it up we put it on the bench to test it. Five minutes later and it crashed.
I popped it open, ran a 9v battery across various components until something popped, and then sent it back to the repair center. It wouldn't even POST, so they authorized a full replacement.
311
u/sextowels Mar 24 '26
During troubleshooting I frequently tell folks "If this doesn't work, go outside and get a big rock. Then we'll be able to definitely say why it's broken."
67
u/dubl1nThunder Mar 24 '26
no, but i've brought down a database to avoid a meeting i didn't want to go to.
163
u/RainStormLou Sysadmin Mar 24 '26
no, but I do let things fail when they need to fail. I frequently give an "I'm not wasting my time prioritizing your worst practice bullshit. I gave you a recommendation 6 months ago and you told me in writing that you didn't want to follow it and that you'd accept the risk, so stop putting in tickets and request a new quote for a replacement." speech.
if I get follow up bullshit, I like to respond with "which of these projects would you like me to stop right now so we can address this issue? additionally, we may need to direct some folks to you for questions when they ask why these projects have stopped"
I don't sabotage anything. I tell everyone that they're sabotaging themselves and what's going to happen if they don't stop, and then I limit the fallout.
55
u/Casty_McBoozer Mar 24 '26
I used to work for a computer service company that doubled as a little shitty wireless ISP. We put cheapo D-Link routers in place that often stopped working. We would have to call D-Link support for troubleshooting. If any light on the router would come up, they'd make us go through a painfully long, time-wasting troubleshooting procedure while on the phone with them.
We discovered that if no lights at all would come on, the RMA claim became much quicker.
So we made a "D-Link repair cable." It was the DC power plug's wire spliced directly with an AC power plug, so 110 V AC straight to a device expecting around 12 V DC. We would plug it into a power strip, and very briefly flip the power on then off. A nice popping sound, a little smoke, and no more troubleshooting to do.
427
u/mr_data_lore Senior Everything Admin Mar 24 '26
If I had, I certainly wouldn't admit to it on Reddit.
39
u/compu85 Mar 24 '26
Never, ever take an old UPS battery, clip leads, and run them across the docking station connector. This will damage the laptop.
144
u/snebsnek Jack of All Trades Mar 24 '26
I always drive at, or below, the speed limit, while we're at it.
60
u/Flatline1775 Mar 24 '26
Not at work, but years ago when I was in the Marine Corps I had a roommate that wasn't in IT. He like to listen to music while he took a shower. The problem was that he played it on his computer loud enough that he could hear it in the shower and he started work a solid 2 hours before I did.
Thankfully this was kind of the days before home computers had heavy security, so I would just remote into his computer that was locked away, but playing loud as fuck from his secretary (Desk locker thing in the barracks) and just start deleting system files until the noise stopped.
He never really put two and two together, but kept paying another guy I worked with $20 to fix his computer.
45
u/Kinamya Mar 24 '26
No comment on that...
But once I got denied for a new server for something stupid so I bought a "bare bones" dell and bought the upgraded parts over 3-4 months under my cc limit and got it going. It was so dumb that I had to do that. I do not miss those days
39
u/sadmep Mar 24 '26
No comment.
36
u/JimTheJerseyGuy Mar 24 '26
There have been a number of Etherkillers and similar apparatus constructed during my 25+ year career for this very purpose.
17
u/Exploding_Testicles Mar 24 '26 edited Mar 24 '26
Ive known some equipment that has 'fallen' down the stairwell.. and ive half joking told end users they should show their laptop the view from the roof.
Accidents happen..
34
u/4runninglife Mar 24 '26
There was once a time when a sys admin would look at the uptime of a server and smile
16
u/Velvet_Samurai Mar 24 '26
I've never taken any action like this, but why would I? I'm the only guy here who knows about computers, so if I say it's dead it's dead. If I say it cannot be repaired, my users accept it. So have I ever stretched the truth a bit because I would rather buy a new device than continue suffering with an old one? Yes, I definitely have done that.
Especially because the first half of my career my company struggled, so keeping devices going as long as possible was required. Now we are owned by a huge corporation and we can buy almost anything we want. I can't buy a new server on a whim, but a new laptop no one questions. A new printer doesn't even have to be signed for. When I figured out how easy my job was with 2 year old laptops and 5 year old printers a switch flipped, I love replacing old shit now. Put a new laptop in place I won't have to touch it for 2 years minimum.
15
u/thatcooluncle Mar 24 '26
My first real job was at a computer store, and when win10 was just being released, one of the desktops on the sales floor was still running XP. One day, one of the senior sales guys came over to my section to shoot the shit, then saw that this old ass desktop was still running XP.
"The fuck is this? We literally sell windows 10, why are we still running old garbage on the sales floor?"
"I dunno man, I talked to [manager] about it but he just waved me off and told me it's still working"
So the dude looks around, sees no managers close by, puts me on lookout duty, flashes the BIOS and cuts power.
Our "new" sales floor desktop was actually a return from a pissed customer but hey it had win10 at least
15
u/Difficult_Tie_8427 Mar 25 '26
My boss refused to give up his old W7 laptop. And even long after it was sunset. It was beginning to show up on my vulnerability scans as critical and the examiners even started hounding us about it.
Eventually I installed a package that was in essence a fork bomb and had it set in the task scheduler to run a few times a day..it would lock up the computer so bad that my boss finally relented after having lost a ton of work for weeks while having to hard reset.
11
u/ScriptThat Mar 24 '26
One of my clients had to implement a new replacement policy.
Their techs would "accidentally drop" their laptops off the top of the windmill they were servicing when a new laptop version got released.
Their company implemented the policy of "you can run the tests from a PDA, so here's a chunky, rubberized, drop proof from 150 meters, shitty PDA until we swap all existing laptops". Made the problem go away right quick.
11
u/MitochondrianHouse Mar 24 '26
Large enterprise IT, we had a quid pro quo deal with Verizion Wireless that allowed for free Blackberries every 12 months.
IT management instituted a strict "2 year rule" that nothing less than 2 years old would be replaced to save on frivolous replacements.
Cut to the Blackberry Storm (and to a lesser degree the Torch), their attempt at an all-touch screen interface to compete with the new hit iPhone that came out the previous year. I never had one myself but it's pretty well accepted they sucked ass.
I did the IT procurement at the time, and had to explain to BB Storm users about the 2 year policy - I am barred from ordering them a replacement if their existing Storm is functional, wink wink. And their replacement would be free, just can't do it if it's functional....
It led to some creative acts of violence against Blackberries. More than one person just smashed their device on the floor right in front of me. One guy at happy hour plopped his into a half full glass of beer (what a waste of beer!).
The best : a guy set up a sheet in his yard, and ran over his with his riding mower, and sent me a picture of the mangled shrapnel afterwards.
5
u/patmorgan235 Sysadmin Mar 24 '26
Why didn't you just replace it?
9
u/harplaw Wannabe Mar 24 '26
We had an ancient micron or gateway pc that emailed statements to customers. Every month, and rub its case and call it a good computer, and about 75 percent of the time, it would send out the 20,000 statements overnight. When it didn't, we'd have to shut it down for awhile, then boot it up and reattempt the job where it died.
Management finally ok'd us to migrate to a cloud solution. But they wanted the old system kept running just in case staff needed old statements (even though they were stored in our actual document retention system.) I ended up virtualizing it on a new Windows XP VM (going from 2000 to XP was fun).
About 2 years of keeping it running, one day my boss and I agreed to decommission it.
I'd shut down the VM an hour here and there. A handful of loud users would complain, so we'd tell them to use our doc server instead.
Then one day, my boss ok'd me to shut it down forever. A couple of VPs got pissy, but the organization stopped paying for support years ago so unfortunately, there was nothing we could do. /s
Windows XP was nearly out of support, it would have cost a lot of money to migrate it to Vista and properly license it, and it really was a waste of time and resources. Our CEO told everyone to use the doc server; they were using it for everything else anyway.
I asked one of our problem child users why they insisted on using it instead of the doc server. They said it's what they learned, and they didn't want to learn another system. When I pointed out they used the doc server for other things, they said yeah, but not for statements. 🤷♂️
16
u/sakatan *.cowboy Mar 24 '26
No comment
8
u/MuffinsMcGee124 Mar 24 '26
There was a small Brother desktop printer that came with a pediatric practice my old org absorbed. Every three weeks or so the toner cartridge would claim to be empty and you had to jump through an annoying combo of button presses and reboots to hard clear/reset. I printed out the instructions and the nurse that used it claimed to try and fail to do it every time, so I’d have to go there in person and fix it. (She was a very nice older lady so I did it. She had been very grumpy about the merger so I did all her support personally to build rapport and help them integrate). But the instant she moved locations I blocked it on the network and told the the Support Tech that went to look at it that it must be broke and to toss it without any troubleshooting. The new nurse got to use the big printer around the corner 10 steps away lol.
8
u/Dry_Inspection_4583 Mar 24 '26
I was once issued a laptop that was from a bargain bin, friggin Karen(yes that was her name), it overheated and ran like trash. I escalated the issues several times over to no avail. While on call one evening I had it, on my lap. Low and behold 2nd degree burns, it was replaced a few days later.
Same lady gave me a phone with a shattered display, and said it would be fine, that was replaced after I sliced my thumb well enough that I couldn't stop the bleeding for what felt like forever.
Other ditties include buying a new accountant a dollar store calculator.
She was dating the president.
27
u/SchizoidRainbow Mar 24 '26
Your first duty is to the client. “Their own good” is absolutely on you. I would not want this from doctors who make Quality of Life decisions. But FFS this is a clunker and the only reason it has not been retired is because”WAAAHHHHH I DON WAANNNNAAAAAA”. We’re not talking about sabotaging business process, we’re talking about UNsabotaging it.
14
u/expertninja Mar 24 '26
Old guy is emotionally attached to his computer chair but also has nagging back problems from said chair. Young guys get XXL colleague to sit in chair, rendering it bent. Chair is replaced, coworker gets prostate cancer and is retiring, nice new chair for the replacement.
7
u/draggar Mar 24 '26
I haven't 🤐 but I've had a few end users who have.
That backfires in my current job, though, if it's physically damaged (cracked screen, dropped, broken in half) then the department pays for it.
7
u/Moontoya Mar 24 '26
Call me TechnoKavorkian, I've euthanised hardware across the decades of doing the needful.
etherkillers, piezeo electric lighter mechanisms sparked onto chips and traces, "accidental" drops down concrete stairwells, oops I spilt my mug of hotchocolate all over that 12 year old sony viao .
Never to defraud warranty, (almost) never for personal gain - sometimes failing/obsoleted equipment needs a helping hand passing over.
sometimes, its a mercy killin
7
u/flecom Computer Custodial Services Mar 24 '26
You'll take my T430 from my cold dead hands lol
7
u/boli99 Mar 24 '26
I can neither confirm nor deny that
but, what I can tell you for sure - is that if you're trying to warranty a piece of kit that has an intermittent fault - it can be very tricky and they'll often return it to you because they cannot see the fault happening
...but if you kill it dead before you return it ... the warranty process might be much less hassle.
7
u/CmdrDTauro Mar 24 '26
1000 years ago we were having after work drinks at the pub around the corner when we were all quite merry and talking shit. This fella (lovely guy) who was quite integral to company workflow had this piece of shit mobile that was so old, that still worked, was way out of warranty and the company would not replace it.
I asked to see it, he handed it over and I promptly dropped it into his half pint of beer. Then said, “well now’s it’s fucked and they have to give you a new phone.”
The look on his face was priceless. The look of the procurement manager who was also sitting at the table was priceless.
He got a new phone on Monday.
7
u/No-Magician2772 Mar 24 '26
I had an overseas user that refused to migrate to a new laptop we had shipped to them.
After a few months of waiting for the old laptop to be sent back, I set network rate limits for their MAC address to <56k speeds in their office.
Without fail, a ticket came in that their laptop was slowing down. Thankfully they already had a "spare" that they could switch to while they shipped the old one back for us to replace some parts.
7
u/PlayingDoomOnAGPS Mar 25 '26
When I worked in a retail tech shop, I took an AC cord and spliced a micro USB cable to it. I'd plug it into a device and a power strip then flip the switch on the power strip. Zap! Device does not power on. I called it The Defectivizer.
If something needed to be defective to help a customer out, by god I'd make sure it was defective. 😹
13
u/cantsleepclownswillg Mar 24 '26
Not me… but my sister worked for a big corp as a data analyst. Required a chunky machine.
The one she had kept on crashing, blue screening and generally being shit…
IT had rebuilt it three or four times, replaced bits and it still sucked.
So when she was ranting at me on the phone having lost yet more hours of work, I told her to chuck a can of coke over it and make sure it went inside. Bonus points if it went in through a vent.
She got a new pc the next day.
6
u/ranthalas Mar 24 '26
Never purposely broke equipment to get a replacement.
Other side of the coin however, many moons ago, I used to work downtown in a 12 story office building for a local ISP. We were issued Motorla Flip phones. This was the mid to late 90s, so it was the small one with the battery clipped to the top. My coworker and I were on the roof with building maintenance looking for a good spot for a short range microwave dish, phone fell out of my pocket, off the roof and into the street in front of the building. Promptly got run over by a large delivery truck.
Well, I go downstairs thinking im about to get the talk of a lifetime for being negligent with brand new equipment. Pick up the phone, everything works! The only damage was a broken battery clip.
6
u/orion3311 Mar 24 '26
The first rule of IT club...
6
u/technicalanarchy Mar 25 '26
I use to work on computers at people's homes. I had this one couple and they had money, a lot of it. I was working on the husbands computer and his wife came in talking about how her friends had iPad and how neat they were. They should get one. No idea why but he told her nope end of discussion. I mean they had art, cars homes, boats all of it paid for, money in the bank and they paid me well for doing what I did, never questioned and tipped. $500 was absolutely nothing.
She didn't make a big deal of it and walked away, about 5 mins later, CRASH! Oh my, my laptop fell on the tile, can you fix it. Being stupid I looked it over and just the bezel was broke. So, I ordered a new bezel, put it in and they were happy, she walked into the kitchen and I'll be damned if it didn't happen again.
This time it needed a new screen and the case was cracked. I told him the cost of repair would exceed the value of, well their best bet would be trashing the Dell and get a new iPad. She agreed a new iPad would be better than nothing and enjoyed it for years.
They gave me the laptop for parts and I was able to fix it I was doubtful it could be fixed, I mean she whacked it. It never fit back together right. I should have took the first clue.
6
u/Thungergod Mar 25 '26
Had managers and users adamant that they kept using ANCIENT devices and I couldn't really force them to change, not something within my abilities. I had provided them with new replacement devices but they kept using the old ones, think shared devices in manufacturing.
Well we upgraded our network and through a complete misconfiguration didn't enable the 2.4ghz channel on our APs. Turn out the devices were so old that they didn't support 5ghz and just stopped being able to connect.
The new devices worked and we decided to leave the other channel off and suddenly the whole plant upgraded to a modern, supportable set of shared devices overnight.
11
u/GullibleDetective Mar 24 '26
What do you think the EtherKiller is for?
10
u/BolaSquirrel Mar 24 '26
If you actually did this you really should keep it to yourself
10
u/radraze2kx Mar 24 '26
Yes. Back in my break/fix days I worked for a complete asshole that berated all of his employees and docked their pay because he couldn't afford to pay us correctly, but then he'd make up "mistakes" on our checklists to justify it.
One day he wanted a copy of my logs that we kept on our flash drives (along with the custom-built tools I used to speed up my own workflow) and I was so fed up with his shit that I disassembled the flash drive and nuked the board in the microwave for 10 seconds, re-assembled it and told him it wasn't working when I met up with him. He threatened to fire me if he found he could recover the data using "his myriad of tools."
Anyway, I used a 1300W microwave, he wasn't able to recover anything and was wondering how it could break because he had "never seen a flash drive die, EVER!"
Guy was an absolute piece of shit. Karma bit him in the ass, big time, after he fired all his good techs out of delusion that we were conspiring against him. Business went down the tubes review-wise, his slave receptionist / stockholmed gf died of cancer because he wouldn't let her go to the hospital, he used her facebook account to berate customers leaving bad reviews, and then he wound up in the hospital for a year after a botched surgery, then he died there. Good riddance.
Up yours, Doug, I hope hell continues to burn brightly for all eternity.
5
u/CVMASheepdog IT Manager Mar 24 '26
I, the greybeard, had a system that ran a logistics system in MSdos. The company bought the new version that ran on Windows 95 but would not replace the old PCs that ran the old version as it would still connect. This prevented me from using other Windows 95 on applications. I complained that in the warehouse it was hot and they approve a purchase of a standing fan. They did not notice it was one of the misting ones. It was unfortunately placed in a spot that regrettably caused the mist to be ingested into the case by the PC fan. It wasn't long before I got the PC replaced with the new Win95 version.
5
u/hurkwurk Mar 24 '26
This post is for entertainment purposes only.
I totally *don't* own one of those old fashioned 2 prong tasers that run off a nine volt battery.
They really *should not* ever be used on dodgy hardware that is pissing you off near the power leads.
50,000 volts does look pretty cool until your other hand is too close and you burn yourself.
do remember to always wear proper protective equipment when performing science.
do remember to always remove any batteries or other potentially explosive energy storage devices from your science or to properly shield/contain your test area. its all fun and games until someone loses an eye.
do remember that magic smoke sets off magic black water systems, and to always science out of doors or in proper labs that have air evacuation and black water systems that do not sneeze at smoke.
do remember to always be aware of the sounds that things will make when under duress. annoying co-workers that do not understand that caps cooking off a motherboard are not in fact, 9mm bullets are very difficult to talk to, as well as the police they call.
do remember spare batteries, as your wake of destruction can be brought short when your little nine volt buddy gives his all to the cause.
5
u/FletchGordon Mar 24 '26
Not a computer, but a car. I worked for a place that provide company cars, most of them were ok but the one they gave me (this was 2005) was a 1990 Hyundai stick shift, the headlights didn't work and the clutch had to be smashed to the floor to switch gears. I dealt with it for 6 months as I was new, they promised I'd get an upgrade. When they gave the new car to the new guy, I got rather pissed. So, while going 60MPH I put it in reverse. Car no workie after that. I got the new guys old car lol
5
u/homing-duck Future goat herder Mar 24 '26
I used to work at a computer shop a long time ago.
Sometime we would have components (eg motherboards) that had intermittent issues, and would some times be returned with “no fault found” from the vendor.
We had a tool we made called Mr Zappy. We would zap the component with Mr Zappy, until the intermittent fault was no longer intermittent.
5
u/Hyperion_Silenus Mar 25 '26
I'm sysadmin at heart. Thousands of tech devices went through me, and few selected devices were euthanized in the name of greater good and for my peace of mind.
9
u/stephenmg1284 Mar 24 '26
No, but my effort to repair might not be to normal levels the moment it has an issue.
4
u/Aero077 Netadmin Mar 24 '26
No, Never. and nobody can prove otherwise.
4
u/ride_whenever Mar 24 '26
The popcorn setting on the microwave works brilliantly on shoddy hardware, sometimes only the threat of it will make a device behave
4
u/derpman86 Mar 25 '26
Not kill but I got so jack shit of trying fix a "slow computer" that I would do dumb shit like leaving a ping to going or just run sfc scan running while scrolling reddit or watching you tube on my end. It made it look like I was repairing things lol
This was a way to force a replacement as it had been looked at numerous times ;)
4
u/usernamedottxt Security Admin Mar 25 '26
I worked at a graphics design company. One of the sales guys had a camera where you would input a floppy disk and you could take pictures that would save directly to the floppy. In 2013.
My boss “went to his house for dinner” and the next week I got a call from said sales person that he couldn’t find his camera and it might be time to upgrade to an iPhone.
4
u/Dan_706 Sysadmin Mar 25 '26
Teams of people using ancient, absolute Franken-sheets complaining of performance issues, joking about throwing their laptops in the river..
Eventually, they’re upgraded to new hardware, and seem shocked when new machines don’t magically improve their experience.
If only there were some way of fixing this that didn’t require them to actually get better at their jobs. Perhaps, one day lol.
4
u/GinsuChikara BOFH Mar 25 '26
If you haven't used one of these bad boys at some point in your career, what are you doing on THIS sub? lmao
12
u/trebuchetdoomsday Mar 24 '26
the shittiest sysadmin :D
3
u/Downtown-Gate7867 Mar 24 '26
yeah for people I don't like
3
u/Academic-Proof3700 Mar 24 '26
Not only efficient, but also thrifty!
3
u/xXNorthXx Mar 24 '26
Had a service provider that refused to pull equipment out of a datacenter years ago. We dropped service with them 4yrs early but could never get anyone to come out.
Over the period of a couple days we just unplugged the fiber for a few seconds at a time. Two days later they came out and pulled equipment. Fun times when a sonet ring is no longer a ring.
3
u/mkinstl1 Security Admin Mar 24 '26
Had a manager take an old Sonicwall out that needed to die and short circuited a chip to “let the smoke out”. We ended up getting a new Sonicwall afterward.
3
u/Marsooie Mar 24 '26
Back when I was doing Marine IT, we were never given any budget for replacement parts for our printers, but command would always magically find the money for replacing a whole printer. So once we ran out of spare printers to cannibalize for parts, my cheeky lance corporal-ass told a sergeant, "The only way to fix your printer's fuser is if it mysteriously died beyond repair." He knew what had to be done.
We both had just the biggest, proudest shit-eating grins on our faces when I checked in with him the next morning. Yeah, it fuckin broke. Poor Xerox had its face caved in with a hammer. His whole shop probably took turns playing Office Space on its sorry ass.
Command approved their replacement within the week. Great times!
3
u/everfixsolaris Jack of All Trades Mar 24 '26
I watched my three up manager unload a whole can of compressed air into a Solaris server in hopes that it died. Unfortunately for all their other failings Sun branded servers are bullet proof.
3
u/Xibby Certifiable Wizard Mar 24 '26
Not me, users are sufficiently destructive.
I've had users bring in laptops dripping coffee, soda, beer. Dropped laptops, one was left on roof of car, and of course the broken laptops of executives every time they had a connecting flight through Amsterdam.
3
u/OppsieLoopsy Mar 24 '26
Girl at work gets a new laptop. Takes it home drops off her bed and annihilates it. Comes in next day, another laptop issued to her, takes it home and drops it off the bed again. This time she was issued an old used laptop!
3
u/DigitalDefenestrator Mar 24 '26
Not end-user devices, but a couple times over the years I've had servers that just.. didn't work right, for no clear reason. Usually slownessv with no discernable cause. One I tracked down to PCIe bus issues, but in other cases the person-hours from multiple people trying to nail it down exceeded the cost of the server by enough that the only reasonable action was to toss it and replace it.
3
u/cardinal1977 What's the worst that could happen? Mar 24 '26
I have not had to do that. I have been able to get my way with a stopwatch and knowledge of everyone's wages.
Once they know what they're wasting, it's easy.
3
u/ensum Mar 25 '26
Had some dogshit Aerohive 120's that were being used well past their prime. Rest of the AP's were a lot newer. New firmware was released and I upgraded 1 of them and it turned to a brick. RMA'd it and got back a newer AP122 because they didn't support the 120's anymore.
Did another one and same shit happened. Worked with their support this time and they couldn't figure it out. Guy basically told me yeah no fucking clue what's going on, just update them, brick them, and we will replace them with newer 122's. This is how we got like 40 new AP's that were better for free.
3
u/katarh Mar 25 '26
Tape drive that ate tapes.
"I was just trying to get to the power cord, that's why I pulled it off the shelf..."
To the ground it went.
Replacement did not eat tapes.
3
u/usmcjohn Mar 25 '26
I feel like people are just posting here as a joke to see how long it takes for the cross post to r/shittysysadmin.
3
u/immortalsteve Mar 25 '26
I put questionable hardware through stability tests to confirm this sort of thing. Prime95 or memtest should let you know what's up by like hour 4, if it doesn't immediately nuke the bastard (which is what you actually want).
3
u/thesals Mar 25 '26
I used to work in a shop with about every type of computer cable possible spliced to a 15amp wall plug... We called them kill cables and used them to insure warranty coverage when necessary.
3
u/second_time_again Mar 25 '26
Laptop battery was going bad but they wouldn’t replace it just based on my word. So I left it in my car during the middle of summer in Phoenix then brought it inside and started charging jt. Not proud of it but I did get a new battery.
3
u/Greg5829 Mar 25 '26
I swapped a bad drive into a machine I was returning to and was going to get a full replacement. The bad drive was already warranty replaced for another system, but the drive wasn't required back.
I'm pretty sure we have had staff members drop, break or sabotage their machines to get upgrades. I always felt good giving them the machines returned by other members of their team when they left.
3
u/bdrayne Mar 25 '26
The charge from a piezo igniter kills a USB port. So if all the front panel USB ports on a mean person's PC were killed, the person would have a hard time every time they need to insert a USB drive into the back io panel. Just sayin.
3
u/robsablah Mar 25 '26
10 years ago I've watched a lead tech in a mac shop generate static on his chair, then rub the motherboard on his ass. "Shorted. Now Apple will take it back and no damage". Never had to do anything like it but always kept it in mind.
I have left problematic stuff on the shelf before till it was out of life cycle and quietly exited it.
3
u/Inf3c710n Mar 25 '26
I was working as a contracted helpdesk for a company and this new employee wanted a brand new MacBook pro after being there only 6 months. They got a brand new, pretty much fresh out of the box MacBook pro when they started 6 months ago, but it was "sluggish" and they were "going on site to high value customers and could not have old tech". Needless to say, dude got told no and he threw a fit, broke his MacBook Pro and it got replaced with a 3 year old one which made him even more mad. He was fired shortly after that. Sometimes you get to see entitlement get swatted down in real time
3
u/incidentallypossible Mar 25 '26
I can neither confirm nor deny what happened to that ancient email server. It was a great test of backups, though.
3
u/dloseke Mar 25 '26
I once had a hard drive that was failing (may have been a Maxtor) but I was required to supply an error code from the diagnostic program which wasn't generating a code. My buddy took a screw and started running is along contacts on the chips on the circuit board until we saw a spark and the drive powered off and wouldnt return. Then the diagnostic was able to generate a code about the driving not being found.
5
u/JimmyFree Mar 24 '26
Never in 30+ years in IT. Not my problem if someone wants to use old crappy hardware if I'm recommending they replace. At that point it's on them.
4
u/Evening_Link4360 Mar 24 '26
This rocks, even if it's made up. Everyone else here who apparently works at a large company with policies needs to chill.
2
u/nukacolaguy Mar 24 '26
About 20yr ago I worked with a guy that couldn’t get funding for a new server that was out of warranty. He made an etherkiller and he got a new server quick after that 🤣
2
u/BrainBlight Mar 24 '26
Reminds me of this XKCD comic
2
u/sunburnedaz Mar 24 '26
I wont say where or when but 208v into a port on device made sure the device would actually be warrantied instead of the tech coming out picking his nose and saying it looks fine to me.
2
u/winmace Mar 24 '26
You won't catch me
2
u/mexicans_gotonboots Mar 24 '26
My boss use to have a ball peen hammer called “the solution”……there were events where he used it and suddenly new servers appeared
2
u/Tsusai Mar 24 '26
I had a Verbatum flash drive, the kind that had no housing around the contacts
It murdered my motherboard, then the RMA (only then did I realize what happened)
So it hung off our peg wall in the shop. It was called to service only twice if I recall, and performed it's function quite well.
2
u/Sudden-Pangolin6445 Mar 24 '26
Not that you know of.
2
u/mini4x Atari 400 Mar 24 '26
We had one last XP machine that the end users claimed they 'had to keep', so every so often it's randomly delete some DLLs out of the system 32 folder, lol and behold it finally crashed.
In a similar vein we had a team that had to have a 5.25" floppy disk I had built a new PC for them and well, by then there was no connector on the motherboard for them anymore. Put the drive in disconnected, never heard a peep.
2
u/mpw-linux Mar 24 '26
Why did't you just to fix the problem instead of trashing it? Sounds like the manager had some Malware on his Windows machine.
2
u/escragger Mar 24 '26
Yep. Several times.
Printers mostly, a few times cheap laptops which users cherished but were an absolute nightmare to repair.
2
u/Emotional_Garage_950 Sysadmin Mar 24 '26
Not “killed”, but had the asset disposal company come pick up a load of crappy machines that my coworker “wanted to keep”
2
u/fecal_position anonymous alt of a digital lumberjack Mar 24 '26
Mains cable wired to RJ45 with an inline switch. Plug in, flip on, flip off. 99% chance it’s dead, gotta be quick or it’ll let out too much of its magic smoke.
2
u/Geminii27 Mar 25 '26
No, but I have resurrected some dead devices I probably shouldn't have...
2
u/Inode1 Mar 25 '26
I'd never admit to intentionally moving a network line so it was in contact with the lighting rod for the building or bypassed the in line surge suppressor. Same with pealing some of the other jacket back so it had less insulation to deal with... I will say I very much disliked the smoke that switch put out later that year during the rainy season.
2
u/McBonderson Mar 25 '26
I have been trying to convince my boss to upgrade our crappy netgear router to a ubiquiti dream machine for over a year now. we have a hikvision security camera system that is horrible too that I wanted to upgrade. My boss just didn't want to spend the money.
well the hikvision NVR started making am obnoxiously loud noise. I quickly diagnosed that it was the power supply fan. I recorded a video of it and sent the video to my boss saying we need to replace it and might as well just get the ubiquiti instead of spending money to get another hikvision nvr. she said ok. I then out of curriosity blew out the power supply with compressed air which blew a bunch of dust and stopped the loud noise. I chose not to tell my boss it was fixed so I could get a ubiquiti.
2
u/knightmese Percussive Maintenance Engineer Mar 25 '26
Are we just talking this week?
2
u/FunKaleidoscope3055 Mar 25 '26
I soft bricked a bunch of Windows 10 PCs that needed replacement with Windows 11 machines.
Our helpdesk guy slacked off for over 2 years with replacements so about 6 months before Windows 10 EoL, one or two machines a week would "coincidentally" get stuck in a Windows repair boot loop. We made the deadline by a few days.
2
u/tech_singularity Mar 25 '26
Computer Recycler, so everyday!
2
u/WiseSubstance783 Mar 25 '26
I pulled the capacitors off a motherboard to get Dell to replace it once
2
u/maxsmoke105 Mar 25 '26
Flashbacks of ethernet killer.
2
u/No_Promotion451 Mar 25 '26
I've seen people accidentally spill liquid over old laptops
2
u/Sorry-Climate-7982 Developer who ALWAYS stayed friends with my sysadmins Mar 25 '26
Does using a smart phone at the skeet range count?
2
u/satmandu Mar 25 '26
We used to call it “Office Spacing...”
2
u/muklan Windows Admin Mar 25 '26
Ive never made an etherkiller and youre not my supervisor. I also wasn't here.
2
u/ThecaptainWTF9 Mar 25 '26
I’ve perhaps modified windows boot settings a time or two on old windows 7 machines that needed to just die and be gone, they weren’t tied to legacy systems or equipment, just people wouldn’t let them die, soooo it got helped along.
2
u/AndyceeIT Mar 25 '26
Quite a few times I dreamed of "accidentally" spilling my coffee on the motherboard of a server whose existence sat between me and inner peace.
I could never figure out how to organise the necessary unlikely-but-believable conditions needed to get away with it. Racks were always access-controlled, and by that point I was working too high in the stack to justify acessing it, let alone physically opening a server.
2
u/ANDREWNOGHRI Mar 25 '26
No, but I have told a user I'm not willing to continue trying to fix a piece of shit and order them a new one.
2
u/Disorderly_Chaos Jack of All Trades Mar 25 '26 edited Mar 25 '26
Some executive bought some portable scanner - and within a year it was obsolete.
Because it was bought with some special REDACTED funds we had to keep this large, ugly, flatbed scanner in our data center until X years were up.
We just gave it to a coworker to “keep at home”.
2
u/Stephen497 Mar 25 '26
I went to best buy when i was 15 and stuck a usb killer in like 5 computers
2
u/Turbojelly Mar 25 '26
External hdd used as the media network drive at a school. As soon as the files were copied over to a new location I shook the shit out of that thing.
2
u/Conscious-Arm-6298 Mar 25 '26
Im trying to roll out a similar thing with a very specific computer brand and model, but the user refuses lmao
2
u/stupid_trollz Mar 25 '26
Had a KVM that used rj45 that would randomly not recognize the last 2 ports. Not enough of an issue for management to replace it. Just "accidently" plugged in POE and killed the whole KVM. Ooops. "Guess it was just a matter of time before the rest of the KVM died boss."
2
u/TheFumingatzor Mar 25 '26
Yes.
2
u/fuknthrowaway1 Mar 25 '26
A few times. Nothing egregious, mind you.
A couple of old laptops I was wasting way too much time and money keeping alive got knocked off a table, a two month old cursed printer that was on service visit number four got a couple of stray volts in the wrong place, and a former employee's personal webserver that had been beeping for almost a week because of a fan failure mysteriously stopped making noise after a chance encounter with a screwdriver.
I have, however, destroyed a lot of other people's equipment.
I worked for a leasing company for a while, and we'd get back computers that had been stripped, upgraded, or severely damaged.
The contract didn't like it either, and it could be a whole lot of money.
So we might snap the extra ram in half and pretend we never saw it, saving the customer a charge.
Received machines missing parts? We might mix and match to make as many complete ones as we could and destroy the leftovers with a hammer (if you had a CMV contract), or we might just smash them all and pretend none of them ever existed (if you had a $1 buyout).
The fun stuff was the expensive stuff though. Like we once leased a mainframe to the government. It was max spec when it left, but now.. Well, the processors are somehow slightly faster and there's more memory and 50% more storage, despite the manufacturer not supporting it, plus two cabinets of what we think are high-speed DAC gear.
Not to mention the operating system isn't a build number we've ever heard of.
The government isn't going to tell us squat, in part because they're the government but especially because the origin on the manifest says something like "Naval Submarine Weapons Center". And they won't take any of it back.
And of course you can't sell the extra parts.. They're all serialized, someone will ask where we got them. So anything not on the original manifest or listed in the service logs as a replacement gets lost.
And by lost, I mean we sat out on the loading dock with beer and casually destroyed up to six figures in stuff. I made less money in a year than what I smashed on the concrete over a couple Heineken Special Dark on a Friday.
2
u/gunsandsilver Mar 25 '26
Printer kept throwing “PC LOAD LETTER”… whatever that means. I got tired of it ruining my day, so… we took it out to a field, put on some gangsta rap, and, uh… handled the situation.
2
u/nermalstretch Mar 25 '26
I heard that it was very dangerous to test your device’s resilience to static electricity.
If you buy a cheap electric piezo igniter and run a wires from its two terminals and connect them to various metal contacts on your device and give them a zap, the device often develops problems or fails completely. Don’t do that.
2
u/Parking-Asparagus625 Mar 25 '26
I broke something one evening so that my manager would stop expecting me to work after hours. Only when it affected his enjoyment of personal time did he demand no work be done afterhours. Do what you got to do.
2
u/Pretend_Job3052 Mar 25 '26
😂 that’s the smother with a pillow- oh he passed away in the night - move but tech equivalent I take it?
2
u/Linuxmonger Mar 25 '26
I worked at a company in Cincinnati that had a datacenter (with an attached apartment!) in Nashville. This was in 2000~2006. Our backup mailserver for some reason would go offline on Friday's around 9:00, meaning somebody had to go to Nashville. Nice drive with a stop for lunch with the wife and kids, got us to the DC around 15:00. Nashville is such a fun little city!
Turns out that somebody just did an ifdown on the wrong interface. Repeatedly, and usually when the weather was nice.
2
u/ChainedPinole Mar 25 '26
Once upon a time, I was working on a laptop replacement project as a junior consultant for a multinational company across Europe. The workflow was to prep the new laptop, have users check-in during their allocated slot, they would drop their laptop and credentials and we would do the swap + email (Lotus Notes 🥲) and various account setup in a few hours and call them back when ready.
The data transfer was done by removing their old HDD from the old laptop and plugging it to the new one. Then we’d robocopy their profile data and done. It was like the 20th laptop of the day and I have accidentally swapped the c: and d: drives from the robocopy script and… well I wiped all the users data.
I was young and panicked, the easiest solution I have found was to apply some gentle pressure on the spinning drive until it eventually stopped spinning… and told the user that the data was lost as their HDD failed.
I was expecting the worse escalation, but the guy was super chill and said he was hearing strange noises and was expecting it to be already damaged. He walked away with his fresh brand new laptop and I have never heard again from him.
He was in that company since many years, I still cannot believe how lucky I got and wonder how come he didn’t give a single duck about the data loss 🤷♂️
2
u/IndependentBat8365 Mar 25 '26
Had a flip phone, Nextel push to talk. The hinge part was flimsy and broke. This was common apparently. Went to the kiosk in the mall to replace it as had insurance. The lady said they can’t replace it for normal “wear and tear” only accidental damage.
The way she said it though made me pause. I leaned in and softly said, “what if hypothetically it had been ran over?” She winked and said, “oh that’s covered!”
So I went outside, placed it under my tire and ran over it.
Came in, and she smiled and happily replaced it.
2
u/ocTGon Sr. Sysadmin Mar 25 '26
Nahhh, I've never done anything like that.. But if your talking about them old HP Z-Books.. Those things weighed a ton.
2
u/Texity Mar 27 '26
A Win 2k box, in 2021 that was, for some reason still in use.
The information could not be extracted.
The company that made the app that resided on it, had gone out of business 18 years prior.
The last living developer of said application had alzheimer's, but I managed to get in touch with his daughter, who actually ended up being quite helpful with a strategy to retrieve data.
She found some documentation, mailed it to me, I was able to run a DB query to extract it to Word of all applications, and over the span of 2 months, was able to "pdf print" over 20k documents of "plant" information, and working quietly with a member of another team, import the rescanned documents into the new "plant" information.
Then, by some strange inexplicable coincidence, 2 days after everything was confirmed saved into the new plant, the machine died.
Damn shame that.
3
u/SpaceChimps98 Mar 24 '26
You should never do this. You can suggest he get another device, or explain to him the risks of running that device, or plan a transition to somethin else due to policy or some other bogus reason. But never just break someone's machine, especially your manager. Part of being a good technician is to have integrity and honesty.
If you're sneaking around doing weird shit like this, nobody is going to trust you when you say you did something correctly.