One-Sided Conversations

It's cool when Siri or Alexa responds to us. What's not cool is when devices initiate the conversation first.

Permanently Signing Off

"I had a laptop audibly say in a mechanical female voice, 'catastrophic failure' then die completely."

– Pokadapuppy20

"R.I.P mechanical female voice, you will be missed."

– ohnomasterskywalker

Native Speaker

"I have an old portable Bluetooth speaker which I often use to listen to music or podcasts in the shower. It's not very loud so I usually put it on one of the ledges inside the shower, furthest from the spray. It talks when its status changes - 'powering on,' 'pairing,' 'low battery' and so on."

"One day I accidentally knocked it down, directly into the shower spray. I immediately snatched it out of the water, turned it off and dried it... then tried turning it back on once it seemed dry enough."

"It still worked. But it speaks Spanish now. I about had a heart attack and then laughed my a** off when I turned it on and, instead of the usual announcement of 'powering on' I heard a completely unfamiliar voice intone 'ENCENDIENDO.'"

"To be clear, there is no discernable way for the user to configure the language of this thing. I can only assume the alternate language settings exist at the firmware level for different distribution regions or something, and whatever the water shorted out or disrupted just happened to flip the right bits into Spanish mode."

"I'm curious if factory reset would switch it back or if it's genuinely broken somehow, but I'm too entertained by the change to even try. The little guy is still going strong and speaking Spanish to this day, and the ENCENDIENDO! still cracks me up when I turn it on. I don't think I'll ever get over the sheer surprise and hilarity of that moment haha."

– ElcieVorta

Watch What Happened

"not a computer, but I used to have this 'talking watch' that would tell you the time when you pushed its button. I left it out in the rain once and when it dried out and started talking again, it had gone insane. It would go off at random times, but it wouldn't say the time, it would just start naming numbers. It also had a rooster noise it could make as an alarm sound, so it would be 4am or something, and I would hear 'one, nine, two, seven, forty, thirty-three, ten, eight, COCKA-DOODLE-DOOOOO!!!'"

funky_grandma

And What?

"My kid's chromebook froze in the middle of a zoom meeting a few weeks ago right when her teacher said the word 'and'. It was repeating 'ANDANDANDANDANDANDANDANDAND!!!!' I couldn't shut if off or turn it down so I threw it in a laundry room cupboard and hurriedly got her back into the meeting on my MacBook. Once class was over I was able to force it to restart but that was nuts."

– WhatsYourGameTuna

Pound Problems

"Turned my entire essay to nothing but these #####. Twice, after I retyped it. Pretty sure the teacher thought I was lying, but I wasn't. Also why on earth would I pick something so weird if I was going to lie about homework. In hindsight, I should have found a different computer to rewrite it."

– Surprised-Salamander

Unwelcome Sounds

These Redditors experienced suspicious sounds until they wracked their brains to figure out the sources.

Static Electricity

"This happened last month. I guess it wasn't really damaged, but every time I'd walk into my room, I'd hear windows disconnect something...'boo-doo.' Literally any time I walked into the threshold of my room. I was freaking out thinking it was my webcam detecting motion or something. Turns out it is static electricity from my socks dumping into my keyboard wire and zapping it; I finally realized the light on the keyboard turning off as I walked in."

– clush

Audio Sampling

"I had a laptop that decided to play random 1-second long audio clips, from random sources, every half minute or so. Random snippets of music, people talking, laughter, birds...nothing I (to my knowledge) had saved on the computer. I don't remember what ended up causing it but you can bet it weirded me the f'k out until I managed to fix it. It doesn't help that it started doing this in the middle of the night."

"Edit: Did some googling and I remember now, it was a trojan virus of some sort."

– Evestiel

The Playback

"I was talking to a friend on my cellphone back in the early 2000's and said goodbye and hung up. The phone immediately rang and I answered. I heard my voice and my half of the same conversation I just had with my friend. I figured that all phone calls were being recorded and parsed after that day."

– D1rtyH1ppy

Announcement

"Working in IT, law partner dropped off his PC with the vague note that there was 'something wrong with it' after lending it to his son. Laptop had a porn toolbar thing, and a fake antivirus that would randomly let out an impressively loud pig screeching noise then threaten to tell the FBI about their porn browsing history unless they 'bought' their antivirus software."

– trowzerss

You Spin Me Round

CD-drives spinning out of control freaked out the following users. Maybe they suspected a demon possessed their computers.

Death Speed

"Back in the late 90s our first family computer was an old Frankenstein junker built by a tech savvy guy who worked with my dad. Worked well enough, but had an ultra high speed CD drive installed (can't remember specs, but it was like 7x typical rpm speed) Sat down to play Diablo one day. Popped in the game CD and notices that it was spinning faster than normal. It sounded like a jet engine taking off. I slowly scooted the chair back and off to the side when suddenly BANG the tray burst open sending shards of broken CD at high speed right past my head and embedded into the wall behind me.

"What's even funnier is that years later I watched an episode of Mythbusters debunking it, claiming that it was impossible for a CD drive to do that. Tell that to the sh*t in my pants that day."

– RazeCrusher

Explosive Disc

"back around 2002ish a friend gave me a bootleg copy of Starcraft, got home put in the cd drive and started installing it. From memory it was a 48x drive, usually fairly noisy , but all of a sudden it started making a LOUD whirring noise and the PC case (Compaq beige of course) started vibrating and then BANG and the disc shattered.... I honest to god thought a car had hit the house or something for a moment , scared the sh*t out of me."

"Figured out what had happened and stripped the PC down, case was full of thousands of tiny fragments of plastic and foil like material, the cd drive unit was missing a while side and the floppy drive next to it had a dent like I'd hit it with a f'king hammer."

was a bit twitchy about using cd's for a while after that...

Ghost In The Machine

"A friend's computer was literally so F-ed that explorer.exe could not be run, or the computer would start to flip. You had to open up task manager ASAP after startup, and kill explorer.exe. But once it was down, you could start-task with the task manager to make anything else run absolutely fine."

"At one point that same computer's CD tray started to flip out too, and started to randomly open and close in rapid succession. Nothing either of us did fixed it or could make it stop short of disconnecting the power, but doing that made windows hang up, and lead to a blue-screen."

"After much exasperation and hours trying to stop it, or figure out why, said friend fed the CD drive a spoonful of tuna casserole during dinner. The offering was accepted, and the CD drive ceased opening and closing."

"This demonically possessed machine was so specifically and oddly messed up we could never fix it, and the freaking out CD drive effectively prevented even a fresh windows install. Never managed to rectify it, and ended up abandoning that cursed thing to build a new one out of spare parts from an upgrade of my gaming rig for him."

– Kauske

Ruined Friendship

"A friends computer broke when we were in the middle of a video game. It was an intense moment and suddenly KSHCNK! Cd exploded in the drive, crashing the computer. I think he blamed me, we didn't ever get along as well after that."

– Bridgebrain

These intelligent devices are complicated machines that can be unpredictable.

But be gentle with your computers and smartphones. Frustrated users tend to take out their aggression on their devices and bash them silly akin to a vending machine refusing to dispense a jammed Snickers bar.

Like humans, machines make errors too. And it could be a matter of time before machines retaliate.