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Sometimes in IT, you have to be less of an engineer and more of a MacGyver with a knack for last-minute miracles.

I saw a post the other day that made me wonder — how many of you have had to pull off a totally random fix just because the situation demanded it?

This is your moment to brag. :flexed_biceps:
Tell us how you saved the day with nothing but creativity, resourcefulness, and a little bit of chaos magic.

So… what’s the wildest quick fix you’ve ever pulled off?

20 Spice ups
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Hmmm, after nearly 30 years there are quite a few. A few years ago, we had to run cabling across a parking lot for a small office to have connectivity. Not having time nor the budget, I mounted line of site Ubiquity transmitter to bridge the distance on each building on either side of the parking lot.

12 Spice ups
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Mine’s a classic: I looked at it, and it started to behave. :smiley:

31 Spice ups
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Same. I would show up to a workstation and low and behold the issue was gone.

13 Spice ups
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Turned on the power strip for a laptop with a dead battery.

15 Spice ups
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Gotta love tech-syndrome :rofl:

8 Spice ups
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and I can do that over the phone too!

9 Spice ups
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This happened so many times at my previous job that a departement wanted to make a cardboard cutout of me. We never did it, but to this day I wonder if it would have worked,

10 Spice ups
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“Quick Fixes?” We don’t do those…we are efficient, sure, but very detailed in our approach…

6 Spice ups
10

This is going back a bit - to a time when mice were real mice, keyboards were real keyboards, and power buttons actually powered things on and off (yes, I’m feeling every year of it, thanks for asking).

I was new to the position, having replaced the previous person. The accountant at one of our branches had been going blue in the face for weeks, as he had in intermittent keyboard. Occasionally it worked - but mostly he went blue all day. It had been swapped out multiple times by the previous IT person for increasingly expensive keyboards, yet the problem remained. When I was called about it, he was in the position of having to upload end-of-year data - to do with VAT or something - and couldn’t get through the process without keyboard failure.

My first bone-headed question after getting called in on a Friday afternoon: ‘Have you tried a different keyboard?’

At this point, the accountant looks like one of the smurfs with hypertension. He’s blue, he’s red, but what is abundantly clear is that yes he has indeed tried a different keyboard. ‘One hour.. this needs to be uploaded in one hour’.. or something like that, I can’t remember the exact time-frame, it was 25 years ago… of course, I tried a different keyboard anyway.. this did not help his colour issues settle down

This was the days of PS2 connectors for mouse and keyboard. So I open open up the case, disconnect everything, hoist out the motherboard, pulled a soldering iron from my trusty toolkit for aspiring nerds, and reworked all the solder joints for the PS2 connector, plus anything else in the immediate vicinity. Put back together and even I was shocked.. it had worked. The VAT stuff got uploaded. The same computer was still working 3 years later when I left

19 Spice ups
11

In the winter of 2020-2021, we facilitated the request to turn a sheep pavilion on the local fairgrounds into a drive-thru COVID testing location by using some Ubiquiti point to point wireless antennas - one mounted on its roof line, pointing to another on the rooftop of a 3-story office/clinic building we operate on the other side of town from our main facility.

The sheep pavilion side was cabled down and up under the edge of the structure, with the cable then zip tied to electric cords with outlets which hung above every livestock pen across the inside of the pavilion until we reached the middle, where we hung a Ubiquiti access point.

Staff used an iPad for documentation, and there was a small enclosed office/room where we set up a couple wireless printers for labels and paper. Traffic was then routed from an adjacent road, through the back of the fairgrounds, then one way through the pavilion, out the other side, and back to the road.

It was quite a site to behold and actually worked well. I just wish I’d thought to take pictures of it all - not sure if anyone else ever did, or not.

8 Spice ups
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Nothing beats the experience of a user complaining of a noisy case fan, walking over and banging the case once with your fist, the sound stopping, and then walking away. It’s pretty funny for all involved.

10 Spice ups
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3 IT folk had been trying for over an hour to get a system to boot, and they asked me into that office to help. I walked in, and it started booting. Got the nickname “resident Jesus” from that event.

Actual fix: Failed hard drive - Had to MacGuyver a jumper out of a paper staple to recover data, only to find the drive was overheating and shutting down. Flipped it over set it on an ice pack, waited 10 minutes then restarted my recovery. Got all of the data, but the ice pack completely melted before it was done, so there were questionable moments for the last 20 minutes…

10 Spice ups
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Server ports in the back, switch ports in the front a few U’s up.
Cables on hand were “just that much short”.

Pulled the servers partially out of the rack to reduce the horizontal distance so the cables would reach.
Temporary fix of course.

8 Spice ups
15

I bent a paper clip into an oval shape to hold together the broken plastic latch on an old Dot Matrix printer.

I also used a shaved down toothpick to fill in the gap on an ADF scanner tray when the flip door broke. Pretty much the same idea except I used wood instead of metal.

7 Spice ups
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BOD was having a meeting couldn’t project to the screen. I walked over and smacked the projector (my grandfather would be proud)… poof workie workie! C level went, really?

I said $200/hr to know where the smack it!

8 Spice ups
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Whatever it was, I probably used a plastic zip tie or three.

8 Spice ups
18

I had an HP laser printer that was jamming in the paper pickup area.

This particular model had a slip clutch on the paper separation roller. There are counter-rotating rollers that separate the sheets of paper as they are fed into the machine, to ensure that only a single sheet is fed. The backpressure roller (that pushes the extra papers back to the tray) has a slip clutch which allows the roller to be pushed forward (instead of backward) when there is only a single sheet between the rollers. On this particular printer, it appeared that the clutch was too strong, so even single sheets weren’t feeding properly.

The clutch was made of two magnets with iron filings between them. I disassembled the clutch, removed some of iron filings, and reassembled. This lowered the “drag” on this clutch just enough so that the problem was resolved. The printer operated without problem for years. (Yes, this was back in the days when printers weren’t quite as evil as they are today.)

Does @Repairatrooper approve of this fix?

4 Spice ups
19

Spinning hard drives notwithstanding. Fixed one noise, caused another [sound of crashed head scraping platter].

5 Spice ups
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I had a Palm III that had a bad connection. Sometimes, it just stopped taking input from the digitizer. Firmly slamming the device against a hard surface always fixed the problem, if only temporarily.

5 Spice ups