Who, Me?<\/a>” \u2013 The Register’s week-opening column that shares your stories of workplace errors and escapes.<\/p>\nThis week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “James,” who told us that in the early 2000s he worked in the biology department of a famous American university.<\/p>\n
“We custom-built all our PCs from the cheapest available parts at the time we ordered,” James wrote.<\/p>\n
Which was how he found himself struggling to attach a heatsink to a CPU destined for use in a new PC.<\/p>\n
“The stupid hook wouldn’t go over the plastic tab and so the heatsink didn’t want to stay on,” he wrote. “Not one to let a computer component get the better of me, I grabbed a flathead screwdriver, stuck it into the little leverage point in the heatsink clamp’s arm and leveraged the hell out of it.”<\/p>\n
The result of that decision was audible.<\/p>\n
“It went PING! and a tiny piece of something went flying away, but the heatsink was now securely mounted,” James told The Register. He therefore connected the PC to power, turned it on, and\u2026 wondered why its fans blew up a storm, but nothing appeared on screen.<\/p>\n
“I removed the CPU, removed heatsink, and took a closer look to find the source for the PING. And there it was, or rather wasn’t \u2013 a very tiny and apparently very important surface-mounted component of some sort was missing right next to where the metal clamps for the heatsink hook in.”<\/p>\n
James was very clearly at fault, but decided the way to fix the problem was to fib about it.<\/p>\n
“I played dumb and called it into tech support at the company we ordered the heatsink from,” he confessed. “They were very nice, accepted the part was dead on arrival, and sent me a replacement right away.”<\/p>\n
“Needless to say I was much more careful with the replacement, which worked great,” James told Who, Me?<\/p>\n
What have you broken with a screwdriver? And how did you get away with it? Click here<\/a> to share your story with The Register. If you want us to use your story in a future Who, Me? we suggest using a keyboard and mouse \u2013 not a screwdriver. \u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"systems Whatever it was broke a PC and led to a face-saving lie WHO, ME?\u00a0 Is it a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":740736,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[59,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-740735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-gb","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=740735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740735\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/740736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=740735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=740735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=740735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}