this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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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.
In engineering speak, that's referred to as "percussive maintenance".
I had a situation ten or so years ago working on a machine that displayed an error code i didn't recognize. I looked in the manual, and it had descriptions for error messages like (E1, E2, etc.), but the message was a couple numbers higher than the highest error in the manual (and as a side note, it's really dumb to program a machine to give an error message without a corresponding key).
I looked through the handwritten old log book for the machine, and found someone referencing the same error code in the early 90's. The error back then occurred after the machine was moved, but it cleared up after being moved again. We guessed that the issue was a loose connection that got jostled back into place. The machine had just been moved slightly again before our issue, so we assumed it was the same.
We ended up opening the machine, and just poking around until we hit the right wire that reconnected itself and cleared the error message. We wrote that down in the log book as a "digital re-alignment" (digital as in fingers).
Sounds exactly like some shit that would happen to me, lmao. Glad you didn't lose your job over it!