Commercial customers get it immediately, it's only the "non-commercial customers" (my Mum, my brother, the guy next door) who don't get it when you say, "It's cheaper and easier to buy a new one".

The only situation where you would attempt this is if you are on Mars, the CO2 scrubbers have stopped working and this is the only cable available to watch the video which has the repair instructions. It's not "impossible" but hardly something you'd attempt under normal circumstances.

Had a call from my mother once. She said that my father had got a shock off the printer (an old Epson line printer - this was some time ago).

There was me thinking it was just maybe static. So I trot on over and proceed to take a look - only to get one hell of a belt from the metal chassis! It threw my arm away from it (but luckily didn't throw me across the room).

Turned out the extension lead it was plugged into was wired incorrectly and it made the chassis live (back in the day before moulded plugs). No idea how that happened as it was the first time that lead had been used.

That must have been a shock for you...

Having seen some shocking (pun intended) wiring recently on supposedly good quality products I'm not surprised at all. Fortunately in my case it was only 12v but given the current draw it could easily have resulted in a fire in my campervan.

A couple of years ago in Amsterdam, I leaned against a plasterboard wall in my basement while holding a microphone in my other hand and felt a solid tingle - not a shock but definitely current going through me. There must have been a metal strut behind the plasterboard, somehow connected to ground (possibly unintentionally through damp - this was, after all, next to a canal) and the phantom power from my baby Behringer must have crept through the mic handle. Unpleasant to say the least.

Used to work in the test dept of a company making high speed line printers. These hammered text a line at a time onto fanfold paper, anything from single part to 6 part self-carbon.

The usual routine to take a stack of test print off the machine was to lift the stack with one hand and give the fold a flick with the forefinger of the other.

The little bar of tinsel that stripped static off the paper hadn't been installed properly on this machine. I lifted the stack, went in for the flick and received a God almighty belt that knocked my arm a good way back. It was just as if I'd been hit hard in the crook of my arm.

I used to like the sound of drum and band printers. We used to have a couple for training purposes only so never experienced static problems.

However by combining a Van de Graaf Generator (totally safe for most people), a bottle of tap water and a piece of blu-tak I nearly killed myself with a 'static' shock so hard I didn't even utter any foul language ...

You made a Leyden jar, a precursor of the capacitor. These can store a significant quantity of electrical charge at high voltages - corona discharge can be seen from these in some cases.

Consider yourself lucky that you were able to write and tell us about this.

Well, it looks like he was solder dud cable...

I was asked to look into a friend's landline phone and ADSL issues as, "You know about these things!"

Fortunately he was sensible enough to accept me saying that the whole of the internal wiring from his phone line needed replacing, and I wasn't going to do it so he hired someone in.

Even better was the annual retainer from him for my services - a bottle of decent Scotch!

That is quite good, I mean, usually the family expects you to do this for free....

My wife once called me at work:

[wife] There is water running out of the corner of laptop and it's making strange, beeping sound!

[me] What happened?

[wife] I spilt a cup of water on it!

Told her to turn it off and let it dry out naturally. The laptop survived.

the missing implied statement here is "... but how could the two events be in any way related?"

I've mentioned this before but many years ago when I was in charge of a small repair workshop I got a call from a very irate customer.

"I spilled coffee on my keyboard and one of your idiot engineers told my secretary to rinse it under a cold tap* and dry it in a warm place!"

"Yeah that sounds about right...?"

"It's a fucking thinkpad!"

After they'd calmed down we agreed, whilst unfortunate, that had this been fully explained, the advice would have been different, and after all, sir, YOU started off by saying nothing about it being a laptop...

*Back when such a thing had about an evens chance of fixing such things (at best).

*Back when such a thing had about an evens chance of fixing such things (at best).

I'd say that for a mechanical keyboard, running under a cold (or a warm) tap and thoroughly drying had a way better than evens chance of fixing things. Membrane keyboards, less so, unless dismantled and cleaned properly.

M.

A friend of my wife's started seeing a guy who worked in IT. I'm not really sure what he does myself, as I don't really care.

One day the friend is talking to her other friends in their WhatsApp group, and one of the friends has a problem with their phone. The friend then volunteers her new boyfriend to help by saying "don't forget X works in IT so he's more than happy to help".

My wife told me about this and was properly pissed off by it. "How dare she, she knows you work in IT too!". Her anger placed in the fact that I hadn't been considered or I was somehow "less" than the new boyfriend when it comes to IT.

I told her that I was secretly delighted with the friend's response as I have absolutely no desire or inclination to fix anyones personal tech.

In the late 90s, I was repairing a PC. It was probably a 486 because we were just starting to replace them with Pentiums where I worked.. The PC wouldn't fire up, as it appeared to have no power. It also had a big click to make button for power. As it turns out, power was certainly getting to this. How do I know? I accidentally brushed my hand against the metal plate on the back of the button, and got 240 volts straight up my arm. Something which cause my arm to jolt and hit the case so hard I *thought* I'd broken one of the smaller bones in my hand. Thankfully, I hadn't. My hand was just badly bruised.

I replaced that button sharpish.

Years ago I was plagued by "can you fix" calls

I'm (now retired) an electrionics tech, I started charging for calls/repairs.... funny how the calls slowed right down. :-)

The most irritating thing about family support is that whilst they will call you when they are completely in the sh1t, they'll take advice from any 'expert' to get themselves there in the first place.

My mother finally got around to getting broadband many years ago and was with AOL and needed a router. I had a spare identical to the one I was already using, it just needed a config tweak to change the MBTU size as AOL used a whacky one. The 'expert' she had paid to set up her new (old and refurbished but still expensive) laptop told her that it would be impossible to use that router as 'its not compatible). When I was called because 'nothing works' a couple of weeks later I found that not onlyhad he charged her over £100 for a router that retailed and £80, it was exactly the same model that I had offered for free. The first issue was that 'her guy' didnt know about the MTBU fix and so the connection was very flaky, the second was that there was no virus protection on the laptop which was infested with viruses, he had installed evaluation copies of products which had then expired, the disk was fragmented to hell and it was missing a service pack (he couldn't download it because the internet connection was so flaky). Needless to say I had given up Saturday morning for this and had plans with my children that afternoon but I didn't get home until 8PM.

I got a call a couple of weeks later complaining that 'the expert' had come back and told her I had 'undone' all his good work and had de-stablised the laptop, he she paid him again to 'fix it'. I never offered to help again.

The second irritating part of supporting family is their belief that all the spares you provide are free. If you turn up with a sound card and memory so you can make your nephews game work there is never an offer of payment, yes I had those spares but they were also earmarked for my sons new computer so I was then stuck paying again for them. My sisters PC always ran like a dog because it didn't have enough memory. I didn't have anything compatible so I refused to go out and buy it, I even gave them a copy of the advert showing where to buy it, at the best price but visit after visit I would be asked to 'tune' the PC, this again usually required the removal of half a dozen viruses as their son kept turning the virus protection off as it made it run faster. In the end I just refused to even look at it and they bought a new PC rather than spending £40 on some additional memory

I have actually been handed a few electronic devices that needed physical repairs because they say "You're good at computers, you should know this stuff". Yes, I am good at computers, but soldering isn't computing, it's electronic engineering. Yes, I can usually find my way around very simple circuits, usually with a lot of work. Yes, I can even solder them, but even that's a slow process. I learned electronics at school, but while I've soldered the odd thing since then, I've not done any serious soldering since then.

I think people assume I'm happy with Electronic stuff because I can and do build my own PCs. That's a different discipline. Sure, if I was designing my own motherboards, or building my own peripherals, that would be Electronics, but I'm not. Building your own PC is more like putting flat pack furniture together. You just need to read up a bit on what parts work with what, because when you've got a motherboard, CPU, GFX card and whatever other cards you want to put in your PC, you won't get a nice, big instruction manual that tells you how to put it together. You get whatever the makers of those devices provide, which is variable, quality wise, and only covers the device itself, not any of the others.

Fortunately I have an electrical/electronics engineer in the family so whilst I'm capable of bodging up simple circuits, mainly I2C interface chips to a RasPi, I can pass anything else on.

When getting to the "so what do you do?" part of smalltalk at a gathering, I'm sure we've all been on the receiving end of "oh, you'll be able to help with my [WiFi | Printer | Old laptop | ... ]

I just say I do pure programming and "other guys" do the hardware stuff.

"i can try, but Im a tester. I'm LITERALLY paid to break things.."

I have this the other way around as I am am electronic technician or was.

We were on holiday in Sweden staying at a swedish friends house when I had the request to look at a laptop with the dreaded BSD. As we were being hosted I found it difficult to refuse so I rebooted the laptop and was met by a string of screen messages all in swedish! I asked the lady of the house to translate but as most of you are aware error messages are not that helpful at the best of times so translating from swedish to english by a non-techical person was a recipe for disaster coupled to which any input needed was also to be in swedish. After a short while and even more BSDs I had to admit defeat.

Reminds me of the time when my company recruited a Japanese technical translator to help us understand various Japanese patents and technical documents. She needed the Japanese version of Win 95 and, as the unofficial team BOFH, I got volunteered to try and get it onto one of our laptops.

What I hadn't realised is that the "language versions" of windows really are "all in" on the language, even in the the setup phase.

It took me several attempts to get it done so she helpfully wrote/drew out all the correct answers to the set up questions for me!

I used to work for a company whose test setup had little automation (although I tried to improve this). One thing we had to do was install Oracle into quite a few different languages - I managed to learn the Oracle database installer so well that I could do it in any language...

> We were on holiday in Sweden staying at a swedish friends house when I had the request to look at a laptop with the dreaded BSD

FreeBSD or OpenBSD?

Judging by the picture I'd be far more concerned about the device the HDMI cable had been plugged into. I once had a camera fall off a tripod whilst plugged into a mini-HDMI cable. Yes, the cable was knackered but more importantly the sudden pull on the cable totally messed up the innards of the camera, resulting in a £250 repair bill. The £5 to replace the cable was not really the issue.

Whenever people call me with issues like this I'll start by explaining to them how they are entitled to my unique no cure, no pay plan. If they are unsatisfied for any reason I'll return the full amount they paid, Yes, up to the full zero $CURRENCY.

And then I tell them there will be absolutely no liability beyond that...

In this specific case, I'd suggest just roughly soldering the wires to somewhere on the plug and then see what happens. Could be fun.

Remember I'm now an electrician. Definitely not white goods repair.

I was recently asked if I could have a look at a built in freezer that "appeared" damaged.

Cause of damage you ask.....

Kitchen fitters had dropped a granite worktop and smashed all the back away.

Joy.....

Dave

I was once called to a large chain eatery that had been vandalised.

Driving into the carpark there were members of every trade imaginable hoping to get the place ready for opening night.

I politely asked where the dmaged credit card machines were, only to be directed to the duck pond outside.

Yip, I was expected to wade in and rescue two rather soggy terminals that incredibly bobbed on the water better than I could. My exclamation that they were BER and two replacements would be there 9am the next day went down like a jobbly in a jaccuzi.

My rule is: call me before you do the stupid, probably no charge...

Call me after and it's £100 call out fee and £100 per hour or part thereof....

Tends to weed out the frivalous "you work in {whatever} so you can fix {?????}"

Had a call from Uncle in Canada one boxing day afternoon; "just installed a driver for sports watch and windows is borked", my answer "Format C and reinstall windows"......