Has technology ever failed you?

The anecdotes of our employees against technology

We love technology. It has provided us with everything we need to be on top of human evolution and dominate this world and perhaps, others soon. At the same time it has also provided us with the automotive industry, the remote control and a wide variety of apps.

But not everything is all rosy and about artificial intelligences that tell you cooking recipes calling you affectionately by name beforehand. Technology also fails, and it tends to do it right when you trust it the most. That is why today I bring you the best anecdotes of our employees against technology. Those times it failed them.

Diego Muñoz-Reja, QA Technician

I totally remember it. I was pretty sleepy in the morning at work. I didn’t sleep well, for whatever reason, partying, video games… The fact is that I started messing with my beloved virtual machines, but there was no way what I was doing would work for me, so I decided to turn off the machine and create a new one. About an hour later, I noticed that the virtual machine was still on, even though I had done a full poweroff. There you have it, what I had turned off was one of the servers that we used in QA for testing. Technology played a trick on me, because obviously I’m not going to blame myself and that morning after getting little sleep.

Dimas Pardo, Communication

I remember it well, it was a summer morning by the pool. My girl and I had woken up to the chirping of birds and the soft breeze that rocked the curtains. It was a bit cold, so I came up with something nice to show my chivalry and my love for her. I was going to bring her breakfast to bed.

While she tried to fall asleep again, I went right into the kitchen. Yogurt with blueberries and tasty granola. Toast with basil oil. And the key element, a glass of warm milk shaken, not stirred, with a gadget that made chocolate milkshakes. I thought: “If this thing works with cold milkshakes, it must nail it with warm milk.” But high tech failed me. The mixer stopped working the moment I dipped its rods into the red hot milk, but not before giving a final jump and throwing the contents at my bare feet. Wear protective clothing when dealing with these types of things! Then I screamed very loudly at that. She got up scared and found me there, half naked and red from the burns of unbeatable hot milk.

Manuel Montes, Q/A

The thing was as follows: in full confinement, one Sunday at midnight, Patricia, head of Administration, talked to Ramón and me and told us about this problem: the battery of her laptop had died and she couldn’t work the following day. Ramón and I got right into it, and looking at the laptop model, we realized that the battery was not removable and the computer had to be disassembled. Just imagine Ramón and me telling Patricia over Meet what screws to remove! Then it turned out that they were not those! Finally we managed to remove it, but the replacement no longer existed! Also when reassembling it half the screws were left over… In short, an odyssey full of laughter late at night. The climax was that, when we had already given up and after reassembling the battery… the computer started up!!! Anyway, things about technology.

* This story is based on real events with some other literary adornment.

Kevin Rojas, Projects

It turns out that now, in October, I am trying to make a challenge to write every day, and the day before yesterday I was inspired and I downloaded a program for the iPad that I found interesting and I stayed until 4 am typing at full speed. This fantastic show had saved what you had written automatically every few minutes, or so it was supposed. When I finally stopped writing and closed the app, it failed and shut down. When I opened it again… guess what, nothing had been saved! Needless to say, I deleted the app and gave it only one star. I’m a bad guy.

Alberto Sánchez, Systems Technician

I really have two official anecdotes against technology, a geek one and one work-related:

The geek one is that I signed up for a paid gaming tournament, DBD (Dead by Daylight), and literally five minutes into the tournament, my computer burnt its motherboard and destroyed my dreams.

The other one. I don’t know if this happened to you too: setting the wake-up alarm to go to a job interview and for the cell phone to decide to go from 90% battery at night to 0%. Of course, the alarm clock did not ring because it had no battery.

Mario Pulido, Head of systems

Once, when we didn’t have so much data on the lines, I visited a client to install Pandora FMS from scratch in a new environment, migrating the old one they had. They did not give me access to the Internet, there was no possibility, so I took the Pandora ISO on a USB and burned it on a DVD too to do the installation. The ISO was 64 bit. When I got there, the environment it was going to be built on didn’t support 64-bit. As I did not have an Internet connection, I started to download the 32-bit ISO with the Internet from my business cell phone. The connection got cut off three times when I had more than 70-80% of the download. At that time our ISO took 900 mb. I ran out of GB so I had to call the company to get more GB and in the end, after spending almost three GB, I was able to download it… Yes, the network made my morning.

And you, has technology ever failed you? Share it with us by leaving a message in the comment box that you will find below!