Tales From Tech Support - I'll make it fit!

***Sometimes, to make a hard drive fit, you need to embrace the "jank".

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Tales From Tech Support - I'll make it fit!

Today's stories are from the subreddit r/talesfromtechsupport
#talesfromtechsuport #unclereddit #funnyredditstories

Welcome to r slash tales from tech support! Where we get to have a little chuckle at the technically (technologically) disadvantaged! (like me!) Today, I went digging into some really good r/talesfromtechsupport stories. Enjoy!

We narrate Funny (or at least ironic) Reddit Stories about Tales From Tech Support as well as other funny Reddit topics! Be sure to scroll down to check out some of our other playlists!

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Uncle Reddit Playlists

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Some of my favorite Reddit YouTubers!
These channels (and a few more) have been the inspiration to start my own channel! Love these guys!
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Credit:

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Disclaimer: All media, including but not limited to images and video, of persons in this video are for dramatization and creative use only and are not representative of the individuals, events, and happenings that are told in the #stories.

Tales From Tech Support - I'll make it fit!

[EvanEdwards]

The pinball story reminds me of the kinds of decisions kids make. I grew up on an island, and we walked down our street to go to the beach all the time. The Hilton hotel on the beach had a small arcade room (it was the 80s), and we'd hit that cool cave of concrete after swimming, carrying quarters underneath the insoles in our sneakers. Many other people would come in after swimming, and as a result the floor tended to have a layer of sand and small puddles of seawater.

One summer we discovered that when the floor was wet, one of the pinball machines would lightly shock people if you touched the metal frame. Of course, being kids, we used that as a prank and also as a contest to see who would keep their hand on it the longest. Also being kids, we ramped up over time until we were pressing our faces to the frame and sticking our tongues on there... to a pinball machine in a grimy, poorly cleaned room off a bar and pool area on an island flooded with tourists bring in who knows what kinds of diseases.

We never did get sick. Or at least not memorably, other than chicken pox and sea lice (not the kind on fish, the jellyfish larvae kind). Eventually, a hurricane took down part of the hotel and it has since been rebuilt into a fancy Marriott resort that runs just shy of a grand a night. But my memories of it are still of pasty tourists covered in oil that stunk of coconut and that sandy saltwater soaked cave with Tempest and Donkey Kong Jr. It also had Galaga, but we played that at the pizza place, so we almost never played it there. Because that's the kind of decisions that kids make.

[lancerevell]

I have a good fuse story. During my second hitch, on my Navy ship I was an Electronic Tech, working on a UHF radio. It wasn't getting power. I was testing the components of the power supply module but couldn't find a fault, but it kept acting like a blown fuse, but the fuse checked good on the multimeter. Weird. Then my Seniorchief says, "You have a 'shorted fuse'!" Sounds strange, fuses ARE a dead short unless blown! But, sure enough, fuse was bad, the element just barely pulled away from contact when it got hot cutting power to the radio, but the wire element would straighten and make contact once it cooled when removed before I got it tested. Cool!
So, months later, they finally sent me to a "C school" on this type radio, after I spent my entire deployment repairing and literally rebuilding the modules when spares ran out. I knew those radios inside and out. I was acing the course, which the instructors didn't like. So, they hit me with their much-vaunted "ace-buster" lab test. I aced it! HEHE, they hit me with the old "shorted fuse"! They were shocked I found it. I told them I'd already seen this in the fleet. I wasn't a fresh-from-A-school newbie they usually taught. I could have taught their course by then. 😂

[SkylerLinux]

For those terrible screw in fuses, I will generally "Rob Peter to play Paul" . Mind I also rent.

[steveruzich]

My 100-year-old house had three 15 amp circuits: heating system, first floor & basement, second floor. So there was one circuit for all the appliances, hair dryer, toaster, computers, etc.

The house had previously been a rental. A neighbor told me that the renters didn't like the fact fuses blew frequently, so I should check the fuse box. The 15 amp sockets contained 20 amp fuses. That could potentially overheat the wires in the walls, and start a fire.

I quickly got that fuse box replaced with circuit breakers, and added circuits.

[HappilyHomicidalHooligan]

When I was much younger (early 20's), I too lived in an older house with the screw-in fuse style distribution panel and when I did my initial pre-move in walk through, the Rental Agent asked me why I opened the panel and I pointed out the 7 circuits that had pennies instead of fuses and said that's why, I'm looking for fire hazards that could kill me and/or the neighbours (it was row style town houses where every house except the 2 end units shared walls with the neighbour on either side). These sockets are meant to have fuses in them for a DAMN good reason and I expect that each Fuse Socket WILL have a properly sized fuse (and pointed to 4 other sockets with 20, 25 or 30 Amp Fuses instead of the 15 Amp Fuse they should have) in it on my Move In Date...

On the day I moved in, I checked the panel and the pennies were gone and each circuit had the proper size Fuse in it and I pulled the main fuse and each Circuit Fuse to install the little plastic washers made to ensure only the proper size (or smaller) Fuse can be screwed into the socket (so a 20 Amp Fuse won't fit in a 15 Amp socket but it will fit in any socket rated 20 Amps or higher)...
Those washers are a nightmare to remove without destroying the socket so I could rest assured that whoever lived there after I left would be safe from the Fire Hazard of over-size Fuses or pennies (the washers also keep pennies from making contact with the bottom terminal of the socket)...so now, if they overload a 15 Amp Circuit, they blow the Fuse instead of burning the house down...

[JV-pukx]

Ran into a similar problem with upgrading my laptop: there was just not enough space for the thicker, 5TB drive, so I had to just stick with a 2TB and a stack of external USB drives.

[nelsonhemstreet]

Reminds me of our office tech guru back in the Days of DOS, when he typed "DEL *.*" and wiped out everything on that disk. Took him two days to recreate it.

[Zanto]

I have my own story related to the last story. Wasn't that confusing tho. With my old isp, which I still haven't canceled, my modem had 2 channels for wifi. So accordingly I named the wifi networks as "surname"Network 2.5Ghz and "surname"Network 5Ghz. While setting up the new internet the clerk in the store asked what I wanted the network to be named. I told her "surname"Network without thinking about it. Shortly after that I realized I may be causing some confusion. Got home and started hooking up the new gateway and swapping over ethernet and wifi connections. All went well until I tried my switch. The switch just wasn't allowing me to connect to the new network. I was about to take a moment to troubleshoot when I finally noticed I was trying to connect to the old, non-existent network with the new password. Que facepalm before setting it up properly.

[TheBlindPhotographer]

My grandma is 89 she would say you're not old yet.

[BWGPEI]

Being an old field service man, I have a special hate for people who bypass or up-rate fuses. First question is always "Why did the fuse blow?" Fix that problem first, don't you know. Blowing up expensive customer components is just not

[wolphin]

Trillian still exists, and I still use it... since I have 1 person left who uses the trillian IM service... sadly, they stopped reverse engineering the services so they would work, and just following the company's idea to force you to use their own client... Sadly, from service shutdown (AIM, MSN...) I have lost contact with many friends.

[TheWabbit]

I've built hundreds of PCs starting in 1991 when as long as a fan or two were running you were fine. During the technical advances hot spots popped up all over, hard drives, memory. Northbridge chips and always CPUs and videocards.
I used to modify the cases on the earlier gaming systems with my own plexiglass windows with fans a cool looking duct system to push air right into the hot spot ( usually videocard ) and a fan right behind it ( I used smoke as a tracer for airflow ) to help pull the air where I wanted it. I set up and soldered all kinds of custom fan controls 3or 4 position and variable speed with different color LED indicators! I just had too much fun with it. Then they started putting windows and multible fans with dust protection and I concentrated on just airflow, I tried to keep air moving in one direction, in the late 90s through mid 2000s it was very difficult to cool everything.
It was like everything was a Hotspot, it had me doing some crazy stuff even bumping up the cfm in the power supply to help guide hot air out without overheating the PS,
I loved it, It was so much fun to drop the temps 20-40 degrees using just air.
Take care!

[FullMetalFab]

My work laptop I added a 500 GB SSD and moved the 1TB HDD over for storage. The SSD is held in place with adhesive foam tape. Hard drive cage was no longer available and SSD's don't care how they are held.

[RO-ipmo]

I remember using pennies for the fuses.

[Avrysatos]

Loved trillian. I remember somehow rigging a whole irc client into it.

[tomschmidt]

Fun bunch of stories this morning. I had to do something similar when I upgraded the drive on a laptop to an SSD. This was an off lease laptop and whoever I bought it from must have had to replace the HDD because it was just sitting there flopping in the breeze so I cobbled together some foam to secure the new SSD. It has been working fine for years.

[PerryMurray-ey]

Had the fuse problem when was working for an insurance/newspaper etc. I get up there on second floor steep stares old glass fuses that someone had put penny behind. Took out pennies that goodness that someone had cut power. Put correct fusses in then found that there was no ground. This was a over one hundred years old building the wiring was paper wrap. To say the least had fun time setting up computers. This was in the 1980's.

[lbmwr]

Dam kids not knowing what a fuse or fuse box is. Lol man

[mmartian]

Besides the ID10T errors, don’t forget about the picnic problems.

Problem In Chair, Not In Computer

[mmartian]

Trillian was the bomb. I loved that app. Most of my friends were on ICQ but not all