We have a small IT environment supporting our building construction business. The owners understood buildings but not IT. Over time, our storage needs had outgrown our servers - but the owners didn't want to invest in proper storage infrastructure like a SAN.

When we ran out of disk space, I had to buy an external USB hard drive and gaffer tape it to each of our servers to handle the extra capacity.

One day one of the owners walked into the server room and saw the gaffer tape. When I explained why we were doing it - he went a bit pale and we were then allowed to go and purchase a proper SAN with proper backup software.

Some years ago we had an Indian doctor in Darwin running our medical accounting software. He spoke with an Oxford British accent.

He had a poor relationship with his staff and thus did not trust them so insisted on running month end processes himself.

He would ring every month for 2 years asking "How do you run Month End?" and every month we would patiently tell him what to do.

We had not missed him calling one month but when he did not call two months in a row, my aprtner and I exchanged looks and wondered whether he had retired, sold the practice etc. Third month came and we got a phone call, from his 16 year old daughter.

She had left school early, knew a little about computers and he made her his Practice Manager. She had a problem we could not fix over the phone so we asked her to send a copy of her backup disk (those days a 5.25" floppy) to us.

We got a letter in the mail from her and inside was a photocopy of the Disk!

My partner said... "I will fix her!". He rang and told her that we could not read what she sent us... could she photocopy the other side? She believed him!!

We rolled in laughter on this one!!

I had my whole life on my laptop; work; photos from the last year, and I was always going to get around to backing it up...

But before I did, the computer died a slow agonising death in which every moment spent in resuscitation was every moment waiting in vain.

Blue screen - black screen with stripes, safe mode, no safe mode, dos command, zippity-doo-dah-zippity-day. Nothing worked.

And becuase you have to purchase the 3 year warranty seperate, not when you buy the machine, I forgot to do it, thus, it broke down 2 weeks after the 1 year warranty ran out.

The company wouldn't look at it initially, so I had a family friend 'have a look'. Call him MacGyver, call him amazing, he managed to get intructions and plans for the machine and pull it apart, to find that a faulty graphics chip had fried itself and pretty much, just the screen wasn't working.

So we put it back together, properly, and sent it back to the manufacturerer who fixed it by replacing it with what looked like a banged up old version from the shop floor.

Since I got it back, the DVD drive wont burn to disc and I know "now the difference between people who have lost data and people who haven't"

I forget exactly how long ago it was now but it was back in about 95 I was working for a IT Solutions.

IT was the latest thing companies were making all kinds on things that would work on your computer.

Being in IT was truly leading/cutting edge.

So although it was a little surprising to receive a call from a user complaining that their foot pedal wasn't working, it wasn't all that strange as we had just finished hearing about a brand new serial port steering wheel with pedals that would work with the original Need For Speed.

So myself and a work colleague at the time wanting to see this new foot pedal technology first hand never mind fix the problem, went out to see the client.

After arriving we were shown to the office of the user in having the problem.

He was green screen data capturer that was given a brand new Win95 PC and thought the cursor was controlled by placing the mouse on floor and moving it around with your foot.

His excuse was why on earth would you put something called a MOUSE on your desk and hold it in your hand.

I was only 15 at the time (1997) and the place i was working at was a local supermaket store which was a job then back when i was in school. i was heavily into computers and just learning c+ and other ms linux opps, the store check out system was a clear hit before any coles or Woolworth stores had ever imagined but.. the story goes on.. the operating system was the dinosaur at the time running a dos 3.30 with a interface that was ahead of time then but as the server, that was a mistake!!! the check out systems used to run 386 2mb ram and a 20mb hard drive (wha!?!?!?!) it was reliable but the software running was overwhelmed on overload, with a barcode system running over a 1400bps .014kb of a twisted wire which ran up in the celing to the back office. the boss got to know me as a teck guy and know all... so he asked me to figure why at the end of a day or when purchasing an item the computers were slowing down and freezing the checkout systems (mind you he would do the purchasing when it was peak time in the afternoon) i did not know at yet of the system until he asked me... so i went to investigate... mind you i was a kinda nerd then and the girls were a total distraction :D but i found out that the network was based on a 1983 modem switch network and three check out systems were using the single .014kb system. when the staff were serving customers with scanning the items the data was being sent to the back office every hit, the boss the other hand was doing purchases via a dail up modem (the ones where you place a speaker (sender) to the reciever and a mic (reciever) and that was chugging on the same network but a little faster (1.2kb) i told him to wait either before or afterday so it would not collide with overloading the system. it worked the next day... the next thing was even funnier but that might be another storey..... :) thanks for reading!!!!@@@@

I have seen many claims for warranty on parts and computers that weren't. I've had a customer who tried to convert a SATA Hard drive to connect to an IDE data cable by removing the plastic above the connecting pins.
His complaint was that the drive did not have pins to connect to the cable.
The best claim that wasn't came about a few years before this when a customer rang and complained that their new monitor was not working. Since it had been picked up a few days before I was very concerned. I asked him to bring it to the shop for possible warranty replacement. When we got to see the monitor it had a small hole in the upper left corner and the screen was crazed with cracks. The hole about 8mm across.
When asked about the hole the customer replied that it must have happened during the drive by shooting they had had the other night EH!
He was not happy when i informed him that bullet holes where not covered by the manufactures warranty

As a young entreprenerial go-getter, I established my first computer networking business in 1995. Out to impress, I would attend all my business meetings and call-outs in a suit and tie.

One morning, I was contacted by a client with an emergency. The main server was unable to boot and the client was unable to process orders.

Clever person that I am, I had set them up with a RAID solution that meant that all their data was backed up on a second drive. So I went out to site, rebuilt the OS and switched to the backup drive and they were back in business.

Before closing the chassis of the server, I removed the faulty drive and asked the boss to get a few people to test the system.

The users were back up and running with no data loss.

The Boss was over the moon, lauding my every move and my incredible confidence and ability at such a young age.

The Boss left the "server room" and asked his staff to start processing orders. I screwed the lid back onto the chassis thinking of the fat cheque I was going to get for the emergency call out.. smile from ear to ear.

That smile immediately disappeared as I turned to grab my tools. I froze, choking as I realized I had screwed my tie into the chassis and as I turned it went taut, bringing the server crashing from the middle of the "rack" a good four feet to the concrete floor.

The boss walked in.. my guess is to tell me that the server was down - only to find me bucked over the destroyed chassis being choked by it.. unable to remove my tie or extract it from the chassis.

I folded the company after that.. it cost me much more than I made on the emergency call. True Story.