Below few occasions and -->fixes:

System is acting weird way. -->"Just wait, it will return soon I hope".
Credit card suddenly stops working and credit card company doesn't find any trace why. --> "Just get two different cards"
Mobile network suddenly goes down; "no network" -->"wait or boot the system."
Computer software crash, you need to reboot, "unexpected error" --> "Just reboot and cross fingers."
Occasional hick-up with cloud service.....IT guy is clueless. --> "just live with it, this is how the things are...."

 

I once interviewed at a company you all know. One of the jobs they asked if I wanted was to find a spurious bug in their networking software that they had been trying to find for years. Not sure what they saw in my resume that made them think I would be interested, but then perhaps they tried this out on everyone they interviewed, hoping to find a sucker.

Bob

 

Power failure during a windows update.

 

Operators pressing the Bright Red Candy Like Button.

 

Not really scary or hopeless, but an internet provider small horror story:

I had been with my cable internet provider for over a year with no problems, using my own NetGear WiFi modem.
Then the internet went down for about a half day a couple months ago.
When it came back up, my modem acted flaky with most of my WiFi devices (about a dozen) not connecting.
I got my VOIP phone working, but only after much fiddling with the settings.
My computers mostly worked, but strangely some sites, like my One Drive and Microsoft Weather, would not connect (!).
This was a real puzzle, since I couldn't imagine what type of failure could cause a modem to partially work.

I went round and round with the cable company and, of course, they insisted everything tested OK at their end so it must be my modem.

So I bought a new and different model NetGear modem.
Surprise, that gave me the exact same problems.
So I returned it (back to square one).

Having no other obvious options, I rented one of the cable company's modems as a last resort.
Of course that modem, which was an Arris brand, worked perfectly.

OK. So being cheap, and not wanting to pay the cable company $14/month to rent a modem, I now bought an Arris modem to try (but different model than the rental).
Interestingly, that also worked perfectly.
So I returned the rental modem.
(One thing nice, was that they only charged me about $5 for the week or so I had their modem.)

So now I'm finally back to where I was before the internet blackout (except for being out $5 and the cost of a new modem).
My conclusion from all this, was that something changed with the cable company internet protocol after the blackout that prevented both my NetGear modems from working properly (even though their modems were stated to be compatible with my cable company).
What incompatibility that could be, I have no idea, although at one point I got an error saying there were no virtual switches (or nodes?) available.

 

You are not alone Cruts. Something basically identical to your case has happened to me also.
Also corrected by replacing the modem.
That worked for a couple of days until last evening, the 4k TV which is the only device hooked up via an ethernet cable, stopped working.
Incongruously, the yellow and green activity Leds are flashing correctly.
It does connect via WiFi correctly.

I hope I can continue troubleshooting it tonight.

 

But to the thread’s original question, my scariest and hopeless moment was when a hard drive crashed on me.
No backup, of course.

Lesson learned: use an external drive to backup everything. Critical items require additional redundancy with cloud backup.

 

On a mountain top flat tire need to call someone to meet us on the bottom as we came down to an actual road, there to get a ride and get tire, however, no service on an ATT or Verizon. Stupid Track Phone I thought at the time lol was the only thing with service ha ha ha ha. My friend keeps ribbing me for scoffing at his suggestion still to this day.

kv

 

I was running VMS on a Marathon system as an Exchange server. Was not very familiar with the commands and made an oops. I accidentally did a recursive delete from the root directory.

I was sure I had just lost my job. Ironically, my actions prevented an irrecoverable disaster, and DEC support was able to recover almost every file! I’m fact, my company gave me a bonus for my quick thinking. Who knew?