The most ridiculous tech ‘problems’ I’ve ever been asked to fix

I’ve been into tech for as long as I can remember, and have essentially been my family’s tech support go-to since I was about twelve years old. Nearly three decades later, I still find myself occasionally being asked to look at people’s computers, phones, smart TVs, and the list goes on.

As you can imagine, I’ve encountered a wide range of problems in that time. Some of them were real issues, others were a bit stranger. With that in mind, I wanted to take a look at some of the funniest, silliest, or just strangest tech problems I’ve encountered over the years. While most of these so-called problems were user errors, others were just funny glitches or mysteries that I have yet to solve even today.

The year is 2001, and I’m a teenager. I had rebuilt an older computer for my grandma as a replacement for her aging word processor. If you don’t know what that is, it’s basically like a computer/typewriter hybrid that is very limited in function.

She tried hard to learn, but never quite got it. I got all sorts of fun calls back in those days, but my favorite was when she called and said, “Andy, I went away from my computer for just fifteen minutes. When I returned, there were all these lines bouncing around, and all these weird glitches on my screen.” I replied to my grandma, “Move the mouse”. Her screen protector was set to turn on after fifteen minutes. Problem solved!

My mom told me her Motorola phone was getting too slow. I usually try to do maintenance on it about every six months or so, but it had been a while. I opened up her phone to figure out the problem. As it turns out, she had over 150 apps installed, many of them running at the same time, and was completely out of extra space.

I was surprised, since she was a pretty light app user, and asked her where all these came from, especially since it was a wide, random range of utility apps, productivity apps, and games. She could only muster, “I honestly don’t know”.

I was convinced she had malware or other issues that were behind this, but despite hours of searching, no problems were found. I cleaned up the extra apps, removed unnecessary files, and eventually did a factory reset just to be safe. That was a year ago, and she hasn’t had problems since. To this day, I’m still not sure how she ended up with so many random apps.

Years ago, my friend asked me to stop by his mom’s house to check out her printer problems, as I lived closer to her than he did. I said yes and went on over. Upon arrival, I went through various printer settings within MacOS and did the same with her phone. I couldn’t find the network.

I’m ashamed to admit it took me roughly 15 minutes to realize the problem. She’d only used the printer once, about a year ago. Her son had set it up with a wired connection, but she’d forgotten and assumed he’d set up Wi-Fi. Even funnier, it turns out that her particular model didn’t even support wireless to begin with.

She felt embarrassed, but honestly, I felt even worse, since I should have noticed there were no Wi-Fi symbols or obvious signs on the printer.

Before her school banned phone use, my daughter was at school after hours working on a project. She was trying to log in to her bank app to check to see if she had funds to go out with friends after and get a treat somewhere. She couldn’t get the password to input correctly. It kept cutting out parts of her password in the process.

She couldn’t figure it out, so she asked me to help. I remotely logged into her phone from home and ran into the same issue. It took me a while to realize that somehow the school’s network filters were being overaggressive and were deleting the three letters, the ones in the middle of the word “sassy”, which was part of her password at the time. She disconnected from the school network, tried the same thing on Wi-Fi, and logged right in.

Last summer, I was helping my aunt and uncle move into a retirement community. While there, they asked if I had time to check out my aunt’s computer as well. She said it had been crashing left and right, and she couldn’t figure it out.

I ran virus checks, malware checks, and tried booting into safe mode. Nothing seemed to work. I did notice that the machine was really low on space, but I figured that couldn’t possibly be the issue. Then I noticed the Recycling Bin was full, so I opened it up. Turns out she had ‘deleted’ a bunch of old programs and files to make room, yet never actually cleared them completely.

It’s a good thing she didn’t either, as I quickly found the problem. Portions of the Windows directory and system files had been thrown away into the bin. The even funnier thing is that my uncle was a programmer and very computer-savvy, so I asked him why he didn’t check and figure it out. His answer? “I’ve fixed her computers dozens of times over the years. She always just finds a way to break something anyhow. I’ve given up trying, and she’s given up asking”. Fair enough, I guess!

So my wife’s aunt needed help because she had gotten a new phone and couldn’t get the internet to work at all. I came over, pulled up her Chrome browser, and it immediately connected without a problem. She seemed so flabbergasted and insisted that it didn’t work for her. I finally had her sit down and show me exactly what she was doing. It turns out she was adding “wwww.” before every website.

For whatever reason, she’d overpress on the keyboard and end up with four Ws instead of three. I decided the easiest solution was just to tell her that websites typically don’t need the “www.” part at all anymore. That seemed to solve her issue.

That’s just six encounters, though I’m sure I’ve had other problems almost as crazy that I’ve long since forgotten about. Now it’s your turn. For those who often troubleshoot for families and friends, what are your craziest stories? We’d love to hear them down in the comments below.