What's the dumbest thing you've done to fix a tech issue?

In my early 20s I had a part-time job as a pizza delivery driver. When there were no deliveries, I would answer phones or take orders at the counter. One day one of the touchscreen monitors at the counter stopped working. It was just black all the time. So we were told not to use it.
A few days later I was on lunch shift and bored, I was trying random things to see if I could fix the monitor. Switched the inputs, switched to a different VGA cable, etc. At one point I discovered the touch panel was still working, I could interact with the OS, even though nothing was displaying. I was pressing around different areas of the screen and I accidentally found that pressing right in the centre of the screen caused the display to re-appear! It would disappear again after a few seconds. Press that spot again, it came back. I was fascinated by this, I showed some coworkers, they didn't care.
Over the course of the day it was getting harder to make the display re-appear. It gradually needed to be pressed quite forcefully to come back. I stared using my knuckles to knock sharply on the spot, and that was working.
When my manager arrived for the night shift, I was excited to show him my discovery. I said "hey man, I kinda fixed this monitor, watch this!" And I enthusiastically knocked hard on the centre of the screen with my first. The LCD lit up and showed the display, but at the same time shattered in a rainbow ring the shape of my fist.
The look on my manager's face was of awe and horror. I was trying to explain what I had meant to do, but I realised what it must've looked like to him. "Hey man, watch me fix this monitor!" Before smashing the screen with a swift punch. It wasn't possible to explain it a way that didn't sound crazy.
In the end I convinced him that the monitor was faulty anyway, and we were going to replace it anyway, so my accident breaking it more is not a big deal.

An ice tray to cold down a router.
I changed ISP, the new one told me that it would take like a week to send me the credentials to use my own ADSL router 🙄, in the meantime I had to use the cheap-ass one they provided.
The new service crashed like after five minutes of use, after some some back and force with the technical support unsuccessfully I notice that the router was extremely hot when the connection crashed and normal when it started to work again.
It has not any cooling system, and being in the middle of the summer didn’t help either.
So…. I tried to put an ice tray from the freezer on the router and it worked. To be “safe” I put a plastic bag between them to avoid any condensation dripping onto the device.

I have a pixel 8 and had a faulty screen caused by poorly installed latches that held down the screen. Slapping above the power button seemed to fix it for about 20 minutes.

Absolutely nothing. Works surprisingly often.

Beating things up in hopes it works. Its weird how often it worked
- People who say violence never solved anything have never really been intimate with a printer

Took an angle grinder to a mini-ITX case to fit a full ATX size board in it.
The board is resting unsecured on an anti-static bag and has a few mm of wiggleroom.
The powersupply is resting, unsecured to anything, on top of the PCIe lanes.
The rear fan is pressed up against the back grill by cables.
The harddrives are just kinda chilling where-ever.
The cables are routed with hopes and dreams.
This is a hypervisor and is the backbone of all my infrastructure.
- At least it's not with a customer.

Shorted the center pin of a transistor in the numerical display of one of those giant build a stack game at Dave and busters. Literally the first thing they had me look at after starting, and that that no one could figure out, I was testing various points with a multi meter when it slipped and bridge two of the legs. At first I was worried a really messed something up, but the dude that had been there forever was like "what'd you do‽ It's working!". Definitely a fix I wasn't expecting.

I’m a web applications developer…. So a lot. But here’s the king of dumb shit fixes I’ve done. Back in the days off VGA a few friends and I met up with some other dudes for a counter strike LAN party. Everyone’s hauling their towers in and if you were lucky, your heavy as fuck 17” CRT. So I set up and my monitor won’t work. Has power, no signal. Switch from the gpu vga port to the integrated one and it works. Switch back to gpu and it works as long as I hold it in a weird position. So it’s all fine, just the connection is massive wearing out. For some reason I figure a little moisture will help so I lick the vga plug, reattach it and it totally solved the problem.
So yeah, I licked a gpu into working again.
- Kinky

Around 2013-2014ish when the fake FBI viruses when commen, I worked at a tech help desk at my university fixing student computers.
We didn't have a bootable virus scan avaliable but I discovered it you ctrl-alt-deleted you could tell the system to log out, it would close everything and log out.
but if during a split second when the device was turning on before the virus blocked the screen and actions you opened a word doc or something,
then when you logged out it would close everything (including the virus's window that was blocking the screen) but the word doc and ask if you wanted to save the document first. By hitting cancel it would stop the logout completely and we could run the various virus scans to get rid of it.
- This reminds me of way back when i beat a virus with task manager.
  This one was showing as a process in task manager. If you killed it, it would just reappear moments later. I even tried finding the folder it was installing on my pc via rightclick on the program in task manager and clicking "open file location" closing the program and deleting its install folder. But it would still come back, installed somewhere else.
  After some time messing around, i noticed that another program would show in the task manager, then the virus would appear, and then the other program would close and disappear from the task manager. All within about 1 or 2 seconds
  So i killed the task, waited for the other program to appear right click it fast, open file location, and there it was, a different folder with a program that auto runs when the virus is removed to reinstall the virus and close itself to avoid detection.
  I deleted that folder and then killed the virus program in the task manager, and it didn't reappear. I had won!
  I seem to recall it was resistent to virus scanners for this reason.
  But this was about 20 years ago so i doubt there are viruses that unsophisticated now.
  
  I had something similar. I was looking at my processes one day for some reason, when I noticed CuteFTP. Now, I knew what it was, but I knew for a fact that I hadn't installed it. Some investigation led to a hidden folder containing some scripts. One of them was for remote control via an IRC channel. So I hopped in the channel and had a chat with the user who was set to admin the bot on my computer.
  Edit: Formatting.

After troubleshooting and rebuilding a pc of a customer back then 6 times , reinstalling it , changing all cables , checking every single hardware connector for damages and they were all pristine , no tools showed errors or anything.
Put the ram into another pc to check it , pc did boot fine , checked no errors , put the ram back in the other pc and pc boots , no issues , 7 day long term test no issues at all.
Idk what it was till today , don't forget I had rebuilt the pc multiple times prior the ram just worked after being in another pc , I even took it a few times out and put back to make sure that the clamps are OK and connector and it wasn't just luck nope , worked every single time afterwards.
- I'd hazard miniscule crap on one of the teeth the other mobo was juust enough in tolerance to catch

When I moved recently my PC suddenly stopped booting.
Before transport I removed the GPU so the PCB wouldn't crack, but my motherboard was showing that it got stuck in the GPU check when booting, so I thought I accidentally broke the GPU by shocking it with static, or popping off some capacitor or something. I still wanted to rule out everything else before buying a new GPU though.
I kept replugging things, thinking it might be a connection that came loose during transport, I reseated the RAM, I tried just one RAM stick, I even reseated the CPU.
Turns out, somehow a CMOS reset fixed it. I'm still confused as to why that worked.

Just thought of another one. I have an old Amiga 1200 which doesn't get powered up much but I accidentally dropped it in a move. Since then it's been prone to randomly crashing. Opened it up, nothing appeared to be dislodged. Somehow discovered that if I prop it up at an angle it doesn't crash any more.

I'm not sure if this counts because it wasn't intentional on my part, but... When I was a kid, my mom had a digital camera. The lense on it would extend when it was powered on, and then retract when it was powered off.
At some point the lense got stuck, which caused the camera to not turn on properly and made it useless so she ended up getting a new one. I had gone to take the old/broken one to mess around with it and accidentally dropped it.
Apparently the angle that it fell at was just enough to "lodge" the lense back into place yet the fall wasn't high enough to cause it to shatter or break. It worked perfectly after that, and while my parents were a bit upset they needlessly bought a new camera, they ended up letting me keep the old one.
(Later on I figured that was their way of justifying not returning the new camera that probably had nice new features or something)
I also vaguely remembering them saying something along the lines of "That's probably the only time in your life dropping a piece of equipment will actually fix it and was just luck - don't go trying that on other things randomly".

My coworker was frustrated that his laptop kept shutting down randomly, going to sleep while he was typing. I looked at his wrists and asked if he was wearing magnetic bracelet, which was 100% the cause. Laptop has magnet sensors to detect the lid was closing, so it went to sleep. His destress (/s) tool became the source of considerable stress until I figured that out

Somewhat related.
I was doing a winter mountaineering course in Scotland (not as epic as it sounds, but damn fun!). We had some pretty gnarly weather, and were practicing navigation in a whiteout. It's pretty easy to lose your sense of direction, there's no landmarks, no reference for what is straight ahead. So the lead person was trudging along, looking down at the compass, following a heading, trudging off into the blank whiteness in a straight line. Every now and then, they would start veering off to the left, then go back straight again- just enough to be perceptible to the people at the back of the line, but not to the person in front. We pulled up a couple of times, lead person kept insisting they were following the compass precisely. It kept happening, so we switched people, same compass, no problem.
It was only when we were back at the lodge and the original lead person was saying how much they loved their electric heated gloves that we figured out what the issue was.

My electric piano requires a very accurate punch in order to the A3 key to work again, I've even read in forums that is the ONLY WAY to fix it. Sounded dumb at the time but it was the fix.
- Sounds like sorcery.
  
  Bruce Lee, Archmage!

Coworker's story: Trying to fix a prototype in a hotel room at a European trade show. Soldering iron on hand, but it was a 120V iron and glowed white hot when plugged into a 240V outlet.
So they had one person solder and the other person keep unplugging and replugging the iron from the wall at roughly 50% duty cycle.
- OK, this wins. Far out...
- I think this might actually be the dumbest. My fear of electricity is one of the main reasons I focus my tech shenanigans on the software side of things rather than the hardware.
  
  You have to do a lot more work on the software side to release the magic smoke

For starters I'm old enough that if your TV or monitor was fuzzy or blurry you gave it a good bang on the top. This worked 50% of the time and was considered common practice but it sounds stupid in retrospect.
But wait there's more: I boiled a demo disc (videogame magazines used to come with a disc of demos for new or unreleased games). During a particular print run of Official Xbox Magazine many of the shipped discs would skip or fail to read and dropping them into boiling water for about 30 seconds was a way change the refractory index of the plastic and fix something that was causing the laser to be unable to read them.
I guess this is my jam because that last one reminded me of another hilarious practice from that era: "Toweling" an Xbox. First generation hardware of the Xbox 360 we're prone to detecting an overheat and sometimes entering a state where they wouldn't boot up anymore and display an iconic "Red ring of death" where the LEDs on the front would light up red and it would it never finished booting. But it was running, just it wouldn't continue. While it was getting a little warm, it seemed to be more a failure of the sensor rather than a catastrophic overheating. So naturally the solution was... Get it hotter. Wrap it in towels blocking all of the fans from doing their job and get it hot enough that the sensor would seem to go out of range and reset itself. This returned it to normal operation for hours or days, for some people indefinitely. Fortunately I haven't "toweled" any electronics lately.
- I worked at a joint that sold 360s. The 'towelling' was a real thing. Apparently they used crappy solder, which when combined with inefficient components and poor cooling, caused the GPU to develop dry joints. Wrapping it in a towel and turning it on would get it hot enough to cause the solder to melt again, and reflow the joints.
  At least, that was the story going around at the time. Whatever the real cause, it often worked. That hardware was such utter dogshit, I'm still amazed that the brand survived. They must have lost so much money in that debacle.

I have two… these are from the old days of computing :)
One: guy said his monitor was showing wavy lines on the screen (old CRT monitor days). Went to his office, looked at his monitor. Sure enough wavy lines. Looked the top of his monitor. Removed the clock sitting on top of said monitor, no more wavy lines. Don’t put electric clocks on CRT monitors folks.
Two: working in a school system. Just before classes started. Get a call “none of the computers turn on”. Go to the classroom. Check a few machines. Machines “turned on” but didn’t boot the OS. Listen to one of the machines… hmmm, no drive noise. Tap it with the back of a screwdriver. Drive spins up, computer boots. Later found out that it was a semi-known problem with Seagate drives. If they sat to long without use, the heads would get stuck.

I wanted to install an extra hard drive in my computer, but the power supply didn't have enough connectors. I actually had a spare power supply unit, but upon testing, the 24 pin cable was too short to reach the motherboard.
I ended up using both PSUs. Only one had a power switch on it, so that was connected to the hard drives. I had to use a paperclip in the unused 24 pin connector to make it output power. The 2 PSUs had a wire running between the ground pins of a random unused connector, and they were on the same phase circuit.
The hard drive PSU had to be turned on first at the switch. Once that was on, I could press the power button to turn on the computer. I think I used it for about a year before buying enough upgrade parts to effectively replace the entire computer.

I stabbed a router with a knife twice and it worked. It knew I wasn't fucking around now.
- We've tried talking, we've tried percussive maintenance, now it's time to take things up a notch and let these silly little machines know who's boss.
  
  Stabbed twice..worked like a dream afterwords.

Easy.
When I was 13, we had an Apple IIc. My mother used to take the cable that connected the computer and the monitor to work with her so I'd focus on homework rather than playing Ultima IV.
But it was a monochrome signal. I straightened out a metal coat hanger and plugged it in... it worked just fine if you didn't bump it.
- Damn, either you were a really smart 13 year old, or you must have been super desperate and then amazed that that actually worked.
  
  Looking back, I have zero ideas on where I came up with the idea or why I even tried it!

Hard drive in the freezer. Broken actuator. Well, I put the entire laptop in. Early 00s probably. Worked for like 3 minutes.
- Think I've done this one too! Desperately trying to rescue some data off a hard drive which just went click click click. Freeze it, try again, works for a few minutes until it warms back up and click click click....

Dead PC.
Unplug PC.
Lick finger.
Stick finger against 3 metal bits where cord goes on power supply.
Plug in PC.
PC works.
- I had a similar issue where a dead PC was resurrected after swapping the power cable. It's never been a fix since, but I still try it.
- What?
  
  He fingered the socket of his PSU's IEC power connector. I suppose this worked because the plug had a loose connection and the moisture might have helped making that connection more solid
  
  Bro fingered his PC

Needed to get a server back online when it's CPU cooler had failed
Found some random cooler for a totally different CPU, smeared thermal paste on it and zip-tied the cooler to the mobo and case as best I could.
That thing ran like a champ for almost 6 months till I got around to replacing it

Friend's desktop was so fried from Kazaa and Limewire, that he couldn't even open a Windows explorer window. Ended up opening Notepad and copying all of his files to a thumbdrive using the file open dialog box before reformatting.
- This kind of hacky dumb workaround is exactly what I wanted to read when I posted this thread, haha. It's kind of genius but also I'm horrified to imagine how things got to that point.
- Didn't notepad file dialogue also use explorer?
  
  IIRC, yes but it's called differently. I've used that technique to work around nannyware a time or two.

Opened and revived a DOA GameGear by cleaning off the furry, green, PCB corrosion. Didn't have any Isopropyl around, so I used vodka.

Told a janitor to not unplug the equipment rack in a closet to plug in their vacuum cleaner. Why they thought that plugging in their vacuum there, rather than just using the outlet not 6 feet away outside the closet is beyond me.
Further, why that closet wasn't locked in the first place. But this was almost 30 years ago and it was another time in IT.
I spoke with the janitor and she started plugging in her vacuum in the adjacent outlet. Then I went to the director of IT and got the capitol cost approved to secure all of the networking closets in the building, which there were 6, one for each floor. Only the one floor was an issue as that closet also house a sink and drain for the janitors to use. There wasn't another place we could move the networking equipment to without laying out a lot of money.

I once had to tell a colleague that her breasts were pressing the space bar when she put an invoice in her processed tray. I don't know about dumb but it was embarrassing.
- Had a coworker who kept complaining anytime she’d open any dialog boxes they immediately closed. Turns out she had a binder sitting on the edge of her keyboard right on the escape key.
- How did she take it?
  
  She was also quite embarrassed. As a fix, we moved her keyboard a few inches.
  
  Hard.

Originally posted here, quoted below for convenience:
Real story.
I was in my late teens. My parents were dragging me to a tiny, kinda culty church every fuckin' weekend. Didn't really have much choice. (Hell, I hadn't even told anyone yet that I thought Christianity was 100% bullshit.)
I had a reputation for knowing my stuff about computers. (Because normies -- particularly boomer normies like Pastor Dipshit -- don't know the difference between programmers and PC support.)
So, one Sunday after the service, Pastor Dipshit asks me to look at his computer. His Outlook was giving an error dialog. Something about not being able to find an email on disk. Clicking the "ok" button just resulted immediately in another dialog, and while the error dialog was present you couldn't interact with the main window, so this rendered Outlook unusable.
Turns out he'd gone and deleted a bunch of files from the filesystem. Like by navigating from "My Computer" down to the directory where Outlook stored its files. Rather than deleting emails through the Outlook GUI the way one is meant to.
So, I mused "hmm, I wonder if it's just giving one error message per email that was affected." I could see in the window behind the error dialog that the total count of emails in his inbox was only a couple hundred or something.
So I commenced to clicking as rapidly as I could. Probably about a minute of clicking later, no more error dialogs and Outlook was usable again.
And everyone marveled at my "genius."
I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't learn his lesson and continued to delete random files from the filesystem, but he kindof lost what was left of his connection to consensus reality and scared even my culty family away and we quit attending that church not terribly long after that, so I couldn't say for sure.

Turned it off ... and then turned it back on again. It feels stupid, but it fixes way more issues than it should.
- That's not stupid, that's one of the first steps of any sane troubleshooting.
  
  It's stupid that it works. 😂

Removed the plastic film on a brand new phone when someone complained that the earpiece sounded bad during calls

Ran a hairdryer all night, propped against my Mac laptop keyboard after a friend knocked over a full pint of beer onto it.
The next morning the whole bathroom reeked of stale beer, the power bill was astronomical, and the left quarter of the keyboard never worked again.
Took it in for repairs and was grateful AppleCare swapped it out without a peep. This was a while back, before the embedded moisture strips that void the warranty.
- Lol! You definitely win.

chmod -R 777 *
- You fucking heathen
- Great idea!

I was working on a e-commerce site for a large furniture manufacturer. They wanted to add a new attribute to a site that dealt with the fabrics they used. This would have been somewhere near 500 individual products with their own value for this attribute. We had to get this lined up on the product csv because somebody didn't think to do it in the erp. One of my managers was set to go in and use Excel to merge the lists, but I realized he would have to do this every month until the end of time. I wrote a quick script on the site to do this anytime the product csv needed to be updated. Write once, run forever.

I had a router that I converted to a access point with openwrt, couldn't get vlan trunking to work, so I ran 3 separate network cables back to the switch and assigned each one to its own WiFi network
- Like the good old days of manual segmentation lol

Told someone to take their headset off their keyboard when help application kept appearing on their screen.
- I had to get someone to find a wireless keyboard they left in a random box because they never used it, yet they still connected the USB receiver for it.
- I can't say I've never been confused by keystrokes from objects laying on my keyboard, but I do usually figure it out within a couple of seconds at most.

Individually press all the Shift, Alt and Ctrl keys.
This was back in the Windows 95 days and persisted for quite a few versions. The symptoms were that when typing you'd get accented or no characters, basically Windows thought one of the keys was held down. It happened more often than you'd think.
- I still see this every few months.
  I think it's happening if a key is released at the same time as a window opens or changes to full screen, but it's too rare to properly troubleshoot. The fix is still the same.

Early in my career (a long time ago), I was tasked with ordering replacement chargers for some laptops. I ordered several off Amazon and even though they were labeled as being what we wanted, they were apparently bootleg and were not, in fact, the correct charger. Fried a few laptops before I realized Amazon wasn’t the “Amazon” of yore selling first-party parts and I was ordering from random third party sellers. (That was all relatively new at the time. Amazon was a bookstore branching out in my head.)
In fairness, I was a programmer and not an electrical engineer. And chargers back then weren’t exactly USB-C level smart. The barrel charger fit. I just thought “Oh, what a great deal. I’ll order these and get plaudits from my boss for saving money.” It wasn’t even my money.
The other one is that when I was learning to code — I’m self-taught because everyone was back then — I used Vim and invented my own style. All my code was basically unformatted or, at best formatted consistently in a very non-standard way. That’s easy to fix nowadays where I can hit save and my code gets formatted automatically but it wasn’t so simple back then. I still feel bad for the engineer who followed me who had to fix that shit.

I just spent the better part of the day trying to get a "music archival tool" to work, but I wasn't able to get my Spotify account to connect.
The eventual solution I ended up with was to spin up a Windows VM, get the tool connected to my Spotify account there and copy over the config file from the Windows installation to my (Linux BTW) actual computer.
Of course, I've never really dabbled in emulation past old video game consoles, so getting a Windows VM up and running involved its own troubleshooting... The whole thing felt absurd, especially since there are so many easy ways to download music, but this was one of those times where I didn't want to let the computer best me.