Featured: What do you do with your Flaky Hardware?™ Part I by the Pedro Picasso

"Bring me thine girls of teenage virtue!"
-CcLeader

We are a cult based on the superstitious things we do to get our hardware working again. Naturally, every once in a while, we'll be asking you, the readers and lowly initiates, "What funny things are wrong with your equipment?" and "What funny things do you do to fix it?" Below is our humble form for submission followed by a couple of stories from our archives. Please feel free to submit multiple times under different names, troll, and flame just like you do everywhere else. The best few entries will be posted.

Pseudonym: AnD
Severity: Hoodoo
Problem: The copy machine in the main copy center fritzed like twice a week. The tech support guy promised us that the problem was easily fixed by turning it off and on but the people in my office were so stupid they couldn't ever perform this simple task.
Solution: About the fifth time our tech support guy was called in to fix it (I arrived on the scene shortly after he did) he came with a rubber chicken which he shook around the copy machine chanting and hopping around like a native american ritual. During this dance I saw him hit the on/off button twice, but nobody else did. When he stopped chanting he told them it was fixed. Everybody was skepticle, but the copy machine worked. He's performed this again every time they've called him. I don't know what's flakier, our copy machine or our staff.

Pseudonym: Gritty
Severity: Malevolence
Problem: The problem is that I'm running Windows NT in the first place.
Solution: I take a step by step approach. I'll talk nice to it. Then I'll yell at it. Then I'll hit it. Then I'll throw a beer bottle at it. Then I'll tell [my dog] Caine to sick it. He never does, but he'll bark at it.

The people quoted above may or may not have been horribly misquoted for comic value. Cult of the Flaky Hardware™ does not guarantee that these stories are real nor that reality exists. By reading this feature, you have agreed not to abbreviate its name to WDYDWYFH™, or to dispute its superfluous trademark™. Furthermore, all your submissions are belong to thank you.