Dad Jokes

No joke, about 20 years ago my brother asked me to build a computer for a friend of his. So I selected the hardware based on the available budget, ordered it online (which was a new thing back then). I used tricks to tweak it, to get the most out of the hardware, really did my best to make it a good machine that would proudly serve for years. In the end I felt like I really made a good machine and I put a lot of effort into it.

Then my brother came to pick it up and my room was in the attic on the end of a rather long set of stairs. We went over the machine, I gave him all the info he needed to know and he would take it to his friend. He walked out of the room, I turned away from the door and hear a devastating smash followed by a lot of bangs, some silence and a shudder. As I walked out of my room, my brother was standing on the top of the stairs with a white face.

He had dropped the machine on the top of the stairs and it went tumbling down. The machine was made of steel (as was the fashion at the time) and it took a couple of chunks out of both the stairs and the wall. We went down and retrieved what was left of the computer. But the limited budget had saved it! The chassis was made from steel, but it was the thin kind of steel to save on costs. This meant the chassis had deformed and all the internals were just fine. We took the whole thing apart, reformed the chassis, put it back together and everything worked. After testing, we were amazed how well the thing held up. Keep in mind this was in the spinning piece of metal storage days and with a CD drive that has a thousand moving parts.

My brother ended up taking the machine to his friend. The chassis still showed some damage, but nothing that stood out and it gave the thing character. The friend ended up loving the whole thing and used it for years to come. I even helped with a couple of upgrades along the way to keep the machine running for longer.

I ended up fixing the wall and the stairs. I did a good job on the stairs, but the damage on the wall was still visible if you knew where to look. This reminded me of the incident every day for years and we still sometimes laugh about that moment.