Recently a quarry worker in South Korea was found dead with a melted phone battery in his shirt pocket. He also had a broken spine and ribs as well as heart and lung injuries, but his death was initially blamed on an exploding cell phone battery.
Predictably, the National Institute of Scientific Investigation found that the injuries the man suffered were too substantial to have been caused by a battery explosion, but the fact that they could have been responsible for the man's death got me thinking.
I've honestly never suffered a major tech disaster, so I am always a little shocked when I hear news of iPods catching on fire in people's pants or exploding laptops. It's scary because we assume our devices are safe and tested so we don't expect anything dangerous to happen to us while using them.
Rivaldi
3suisses
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My biggest tragedy happened a few years ago. Someone broke into my house, stole my computer, and the stack of backup CDs that I had sitting right beside it.
1I almost lost all the data in my hard drive...all my works from years ago. That was pretty scary.
Oh and apparently someone ran over that guy who everyone thought died from battery explosion when they were working and tried to make it look like a battery explosion...he's now arrested!
2nothing tragic ever happened to one of my electronics, but one day my ipod wouldnt play sound. there was something wrong with it, were you plug in the head phones. also once my computer crashed and i lost all my music, but thankfully i found a website were i could download the music from my ipod back onto my computer.
3I lost my computer's power cord and it ran out of battery life two days before a huge project was due. Plus the company couldn't, for whatever reason, overnight the cord.
4Thankfully a guy at a store let me use a product so I could at least get the project off of my computer; without having to pay the $80 to buy the product.
just in order...
completely & udderly my own fault:
my camera fell (maybe a couple feet, off a small table) and the battery door broke
i spilt diet pepsi with grenadine on my ibook G4
my 60gig ipod got ran over by a car
i spilt milk on my boyfriend's macbookpro
something wrong with the product:
5ibook (original) power cord set fire at the computer and started sparking
my boyfriend and i have gone through 4 apple ac power adapters (at least 5 people i know have burned through at least one)
my boyfriend's macbookpro battery later exploded
boyfriend's ipod battery disconnects
ketkatherine- we have an Apple warranty shop and I haven't seen that many bad (the melty ones) AC adapters in our entire 10 years of doing this. Let alone a real exploded battery (plenty of the swollen ones). You may have the worst luck of anyone, EVER!! You might want to go to Vegas or buy a lottery ticket as your luck really has to turn around at some point
My worst disaster was having some jerk steal my PowerBook G4, I was fairly devastated. I've had a few bad hard drives and a few bad logic boards. With a bad logic board you lose access to your data but at least not the data itself. With the hard drives I was able to recognize the signs of impending doom and rescue the data
6Spilling a bottle of Skyy Blue Vodka onto my laptop computer senior year in college. The alcohol ended up curling the keys on my keyboard, and I had to attach a new one on top for the rest of the year
7all my fault-- got drunk and kicked over my full cup of crown and coke ontop my laptop.
sad thing is that the POS Dell (that went thru 4 cd burners in 6 months) still worked.
8I spilled a glass of wine into my REALLY NICE Dell 17" Inspiron laptop that was company-owned. So of course my boss replaced it with a 15" Acer Aspire laptop that originally had Vista on 512 MB of RAM, which is useless. I've had to 2 different RAM upgrades to make this thing run halfway decently. It has 1.5G of RAM now and still doesn't compare.
9360, red rings of death!
10my webcam broke
and my bf just moved 5 hours away. so i bought another one the next day. haha
11I think the worst thing to ever happen was when my dad f*cked up my computer and I lost all my photography. I should have had back ups or something but I just never thought it'd happen..I still don't have back ups..guess I didn't really learn anything..did I..
12Water got into my creative zen vision:m. Hard drive failure. Heartbreak
13We stored all of our photos and documents we wanted to keep on a external hard disk just to be safe. Then one day we couldn't access anything on it. We tried everything, spent about 10 hours on the phone with different support people and finally bought recovery software that got back about 75% of our stuff. It was a nightmare.
14The worst thing that happened to me wasn't that bad. I broke my ibook charger (and new ones cost $80!!!), so i got one and ended up breaking it within a week. ☹
15Back in '04 my dell desktop cpu came down w/ a virus and was wiped out. The tech guy had to clean everything off my cpu and starrt from scrach then I found out the computer still didn't run right and then it was attacked by a virus again! I don't know hw since I had norton virus software on there however I had to toss the cpu. I know have a compaq laptop that's 4yrs old however it works fine.
16Nothing ever too tragic...I ran over my cell phone one time in college (it had slipped out of my pocket and I didn't know). And my old laptop just decided to stop working one day. Luckily, I had a computer science major friend who was able to fix it for me, but I still lost everything that I had saved. It sucked, but I had back-ups of everything on my personal account drive at school, so I was covered as far as school-related documents. My hubby, though, has had terrible luck with Mac hard drives...his macbooks (2 different ones) have crashed a total of 3 times. I've wanted to get a mac, but I admit I'm deterred because he's always having to go to the Apple store to get his fixed, and my little old D
17Oops! Sorry, I don't know what happened above...I meant to say my Dell is still trucking along!
18I washed my iPhone in my pocket.
Not! I just thought I did. I've never been so panicked in my life. I also didn't know I could move that fast and manage to avoid everything in my way with gazelle-like grace while running to the laundry room.
19my ibook died. It was like losing a loved one.
20I balled my eyes out
My first Ipod (3rd gen?) for some reason wouldn't turn off and was frozen. It was getting really hot, so I took it back to the store and of course then it turned off. But it wouldn't turn back on. Luckily they replaced it with a newer one. Free IPOD!
KitKatherine, You do have the worst luck. I thought I was bad with spilling stuff. I did spill pineapple banana orange juice on my work laptop recently. Only the enter key doesn't work. Go figure.
21this isn't really that bad but its just funny - i flushed my cell phone down the toilet
22- Back in the days of Windows 3.1, I accidentally deleted command.com. My mom had to take the computer to the tech support guys at her office. (I was around 12 I think...)
- About 15 years ago we had a 28" CRT TV delivered. It weighed something like 150 lbs. On the front step, the delivery guys dropped and smashed it to bits. Luckily it was replaced free.
- My computer was failing to turn on -- about half the time -- for some reason. Then suddenly I turned it on and got the message "No operating system found." Kyaaa! What does that mean?!? I took it to a shop and they got it working again, half the time, but it was months before I figured out that a defective hard drive was to blame.
- I once accidentally reformatted my 2nd HD with all my media backups on it while trying to reinstall it (it was a large drive and needed special drivers or something). 180GB... GONE! Nothing totally essential but a huge pain in the butt.
- I've dropped my Zen Micro about 10 times, but it still (mostly) works. The first time I dropped it, though, about a month after I bought it, I broke the radio... and the little sticker that was supposed to prove I didn't open it for warranty purposes. I swear I didn't open it!! (Until later at least. Heheh.)
23My boyfriend and I have gone through four chargers for our ibooks and now macbooks. Three melted, and one died when the ibook was knocked to the floor. I've lost an ibook because my dad accidently kicked it off the couch. I've had two faulty logic boards, and one time I lost almost everything on my computer. Now, I back up all files twice- to my Lacie drive and then to dvds.
24SkinnyMarie- that happens to my ipod all the time, if it happens with your new one. let it turn off (it is actually waiting for the battery to die) then you plug it into your charger. and it should work just fine.
25Right before term paper season last year the mother board on my computer died. And the kind my computer used was no longer made. I did end up getting a new computer at the end of all of that, though.
26I dropped my beloved Cell Phone in a public toilet....
27I had a Dell Laptop.
28Need I say more?
D:
At my first design job, I had to reformat and reinstall everything on my teal G3. Also at that job, I had a Jaz disc go bad and lost all the data on it.
29My laptop screen fell off and then Best Buy replaced my laptop with the same one, and surprise, the same thing happened.
30Nothing exciting like fires or anything, but I once had a weird experience with a computer. I got an eMachine, great deal at Sam's Club. I powered it up and had at it for about a month, no internet or anything, just turned it on and off, wrote a few things on Word, and a ton of solitaire games. A month of that and it up and CRASHED! Later realized it was probably because it was running ME, but after lots of phone calls talking to Dell and the factor reset CDs I got it functioning again. It was amazing getting rid of that thing and getting a new computer!
31Ive had a pc go berserk. And one's power supply die. The latter i totally fixed.
32um, yeah, my cell phone's posessed and it locked me inside a closet for about three days before i managed to cut my way out with a chain saw. just kidding!
33I spilled a glass of ice tea on my laptop!
34My HP laptop overheated...and its hard drive failed...all at the same time.
35My hard drive in my computer blew up!!! I was in my final semester of college...and i lost a TON of work....I had to stress even more than I was and redo everything...
36Moral of the story: always back up your work!!!
My mother doesn't like computers, she plays solitaire and that's it. When I was doing my A-Levels I had all my coursework on our computer. One day I turned it on - and it was ALL gone! I nearly threw up.
37My ma had unplugged the computer while it was on and EVERYTHING had been wiped.
Nightmare.
I bought myself an ibook about 2 years ago but sadly it had one of the batteries that needed to be replaced. It's been perfect ever since though! *Touch wood*
I don't think I have ever really suffered from a tech disaster!
38My worst tech disaster was at work when our network computer crashed and we lost all of our work. When we got a new one we had lost like a month worth of information on Quickbooks (our accounting software) and i had to re-enter all of our deposits, checks and invoices for the prior month for two different companies. It sucked it was so time consuming. Now we have a company that does back ups off site.
39My computer has crashed before, but nothing life threatening...
40here are a few: i dropped my cell phone in the can. i splilled wine on my laptop and fried it, my brother's stupid dog tipped over my laptop - broke it and then my brother laughed at me and said it was my fault - the creep, my hard drive died and i was not backup. i know this will happen again.
this will look like selling but its really not. i really use outlook for school and work. my dad has me on his exchange server with www.123together.com for outlook and for my emails. this way no matter what i do not loose my life its all. links my cell phone and lap top to which is cool.
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