Sounds like you were describing me trying to explain computers to my relatives. But I'm safe, they don't like things they don't understand and thus would not even bother asking me about computers.
My relatives still live in the 70's :(

My only really horrifying story was when I was a kid and trying to install a Dragonball Z screensaver onto my (brand new!) Win95 machine, but I accidentally managed to delete several very important system files instead. So the computer had to get reformatted, but we fortunately didn't lose much apart from having to reinstall absolutely everything. Man were my parents MAD, though.

One time we made a custom Anaconda installed Linux with our software in the installer. We found out we should put a confirmation prompt on it when one of the devs on the team left a copy in his CD drive and rebooted...

In the days before California banned smoking in offices, we had a receptionist who chain-smoked. And no matter how many times we told her to stop doing that, she smoked at her desk and let ashes fall in her keyboard. She was the only person I ever knew who could destroy a Keytronic keyboard. She destroyed three of them, and got angry every time. She especially did not appreciate it when she complained to me that some keys had stopped working, and I turned her keyboard upside down and shook the ashes out. We finally fired her.

That feeling of "OhholycrapwhatthehelldidIjustdo!" is positively sickening.

Yes, yes it is.

Could you elaborate as to why its bad?

Another thing I just remembered: I once overwrote 40 pages of carefully crafted text with some tables from another document. Instead of pressing "Save As", I accidentally pressed "Save", thus almost ruining the original document and a few week's work. Undelete applications didn't help, since the file was there, only it was changed. The only thing that saved me was an older version uploaded to my Gmail account. I can't think of a reason why Microsoft hasn't built a failsafe feature in its Word yet; a system that would make a new file/version of the document every X minutes, so that you can always roll back to a previous version if you happen to overwrite the main file. At least today hard drive space isn't a problem, and I imagine many users have faced this problem at least once.

I spilt Coca-Cola on my laptop about 5 years ago. I immediately turned it off and put it upside down overnight. Unfortunately, the laptop would randomly press down keys every now and then but still worked. It was a real waste of a fairly new laptop.

Such a horrible feeling when it happened. Felt terrible.

spilling coolaid on a keyboard... and having to use this old keyboard from like 2002

It always stings when something ceases working, especially if you lose gigabytes of data in the process. Like when I disconnected one 500GB PATA hard drive and put it resting on top of the PC case (I think that hard drive was originally connected to my TV recorder box, so it was full of movies and TV series I had recorded from TV).

I think I felt a slight zap, a static electricity shock when I put it on top of the PC case. After that, the hard drive was completely dead, apparently I zapped something in its electronics.


On my first gaming PC, I didn't heed the warnings that you must disconnect your modem from the phone line, if there is a chance of a thunder storm outside. I vividly remember I was playing Ultima Underworld one nice summer day. Suddenly the game froze with a weird noise, i thought it was some generic game problem... until I smelled something burning, and heard a thunder outside.

I rushed to switch off and disconnect my precious PC, and I remember anxiously waiting for the storm to end in order to check the damages.

In the end I was quite lucky. The modem was a goner IIRC, but the PC itself was still working fine, and served me many more years. I even finished UUW later, otherwise it could still sit in my backlog unfinished!

Several years ago I cleaned a 7800 GTX graphics card with the vacuum cleaner (I know...) and heard something tumble down the pipe into the cleaner. I searched the bag thoroughly but couldn't find it. In the process of trying to figure out what I'd done, I learned all about MOSFETs. Now I just blow very hard on my hardware and try not to spit on it. One day I might invest in a can of compressed air.

Actually, not so much horror stories as miraculous repair stories. Had a netbook that died but was still under warranty. Sent it in and they said it had liquid damage and it would cost $300+ to repair, which was as much as the thing was worth. I told them just to send it back. Opened it up, swabbed it off with alcohol and voila! It's been running smoothly for over a year now. Two iPods and a cell phone went through the wash. Let them dry out and they still work great. The one iPod lost its backlight, but that may actually be due to me opening it up to see what it looked like inside...

One horror story, though, is from work. I am the unofficial/official tech support guy for a construction company. One of the site laptops was left on the floor of a site that flooded. They wanted me to see if I could fix it. Funny thing is, if the first response of the guys on site wasn't to turn it on to see if it still worked I might have been able to save it... well, at least I was able to salvage the RAM and hard drive...

For the same reason that losing your graduation or baby photos is bad, there's no replacing what you lost. In addition you then get to rebuild the fucked up machine and during all that time you get to reminisce just over just how damned stupid you feel.

One time, I went to play flash games on this awesome site (used it for months) and ended up getting pop-ups, errors, BSODs, and auto restarts caused by a virus. My computer recovered but suffered permanent damage. -_-