There’s a whole thread about the date display on my old Hyundai Santa Fe that didn’t know how to switch over to March after Leap Day every four years, and just continued racking up the days in February. Then it got really weird after it hit Feb 99.
I had a hard drive on laptop die on me the first week of graduate school. I was in the process of getting everything set up: folders for term papers organized by classes, links to Google Scholar and my school’s library database, and similar housekeeping tasks. One of the things I did, and I don’t remember the exact process, was to set up Dropbox as a backup for everything created in Word. When that was done I migrated a lot of extant documents and pictures and other random soft copies into Dropbox and organized it by class, drafts, photos, etc. I had a lot of stuff in it already when school started. A week later my computer died.
Here’s the kicker: when my hard drive died everything in my Dropbox was erased. When the hard drive first died I didn’t panic because I had another laptop and hey, everything I had been working on was stored on Dropbox, right? Nope. It was wiped clean. I had some of that stuff stored on a flash drive, but a lot of it was either lost for good or I had to recreate it.
After that I switched to writing in Google Docs and I bought an external hard drive for backup, one that I could unplug when I wasn’t actively backing up data.
I still don’t know how it erased everything in my Dropbox account when it died.
Creepy, but mostly heartbreaking 
Any chance there was a virus, that DELETED stuff before killing the hard drive?
Dropbox should do some backing up to allow recovery of deleted files, though I don’t know if this would work if the whole shebang got clobbered. Now you’ve got me worried - we have a LOT of stuff that would cause problems if it went bye-bye… like all our financial and tax records.
It’s possible. What I know about IT I could write on a postage stamp with a sharpie – e.g., I know nothing. A couple of tech nerds I’ve told this story to scoffed at me and told me that what happened isn’t possible. Well ok, but it did happen. I don’t know how it happened but the timing was too good to be a coincidence. One caused the other, I’m sure.
I’ll never use Dropbox again and now always, but always have redundancy backup for things like photos and any important paperwork.
If a vehicle can be considered a device…
Many decades ago a friend of mine owned a car that honked its horn every time he made a left turn.
mmm
My 1975 VW bus did that when I first got it. 16yo me solved the problem by slithering under the front end with a pair of cutting dikes, locating the horn, and severing its power supply.
I have an Audi which has MMI (Multi Media Interface). My Audi has an instrument panel that is a single LCD screen with all the usual gauges displayed, with the extra feature of allowing me to transfer the views from the LCD screen in the middle of the dash (like the nav screen, the media, the phone, etc.) to the instrument panel, with reduced size gauges. (see below for an example).
I discovered the drawback of this cruising down the freeway when suddenly my center LCD and instrument panel both turned off! This induced a bit of panic, as I didn’t know if something drastic was going on with my electronics in the car. I pulled off at the nearest exit, turned the car off and restarted it and everything came back. After a second and third occurrence, I came to realize that the button on the right side of my console that controlled the volume of whatever media I was playing was also the on/off switch (see below), push down for on/off. (OK, I knew it was an on/off switch, but I assumed it just turned off the media/radio).
It turns out that if I had a passenger who rested their arm on the center console or was just a little careless in reaching for something in the passenger’s seat, the button could get pressed and everything in both displays would turn off, so I’d essentially be “flying blind” as far as speed, etc.
Not since the PC clone wars?
That sounds more like an example for the “stupidest product design” thread.
Android changed the default function of the power button to ‘Launch Assistant’ (Bixby in the case of Samsung). It is terrible design and the first setting I change on a new install.
Thank you! I hadn’t realized I could do this!
I had an oven that got stuck in Sabbath mode and would not exit. I had to replace the control panel.
The very existence of such a mode surprised me and led me down a rabbit hole of other devices with said modes and the reasoning behind them.
20 years ago or more, there used to be jokes along the lines of “what if computer programmers designed cars? Every time a warning light went on, you’d have to turn off the car and turn it back on again.” And here we are.
My late ex drove a first-generation Hyundai Excel with a single warning “ding” for every alert. I think it was actually a little mechanical bell tinkling somewhere, because it dinged when you drove over a pebble.
Glad my travails there helped you all. I need to find the twerp who thought up that brilliant idea and slowly lower him into a piranha tank by his gonads.
It could have been worse, you could have gotten stuck in Black Sabbath mose
I once had a portable cassette player that malfunctioned in a really fun way. It had a button on it that was supposed to make it switch from playing Side A to Side B, but it eventually broke in such a way that now it would switch from playing Side A forward to playing Side A backwards. Now, that might not sound impressive to the kids of today, who grew up being able to pop a song into a computer and manipulate it in any number of interesting ways, but in the early 1990s, this was pretty fucking neat. My friends and I were able to figure out some hidden treats in songs by Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa.
Another car one, though not especially weird, and I think I whined about it in the rants thread …
About six months ago I got a new battery for the car, because the old one was clearly getting weak. Since then the new battery performed flawlessly, lots of cranking power and the car starting pretty much instantly. Until one day, after the car had been sitting in the garage for a couple of days, I opened the door and the interior lights didn’t come on. When I turned the ignition there was nothing – not even a clicking sound. The battery was 100% dead.
I boosted it and took it to the auto place that had installed the battery. They said there was nothing wrong with the battery but the alternator was flaky and was cutting in and out. I was dubious about this analysis but it was probably correct – they replaced the alternator and also replaced the battery under warranty, which was good because going completely flat shortens battery life considerably. I think this was a couple of weeks ago and it’s been fine since then. Just glad it wasn’t some unknown electrical drain, which can be hell to track down.
My cars back up camera works when it’s warmer out. So at my house in the mountains it does not work because it’s cold.
It’s either the cold, or altitude. But I really doubt altitude.
I remember working in a TV shop way back when people would get their tvs repaired, and the guys would spray cold air on electronics to test for a possible lose connection. I suspect I have a short/lose connection in it.
When I’ve taken it to be fixed, it’s always warm out and working, and they don’t want to touch it.
My favorite trick, which would also not seem so impressive today, was to take a dubbing cassette boombox and put only one cassette in and tell the machine to “fast dub”, but hold the internal button on the second cassette slot and not put any actual cassette in it, so the machine thinks it is dubbing but is actually only playing the first cassette very quickly.