74 Electronics Fails So Bad They Basically Wrote Their Own Eulogy

It's worth knowing what electricity actually does to the human body, because it's a little scary. A static shock sits at just 1 milliamp (mA), but bump it up to 5 mA, about the level of a TENS muscle therapy device, and it gets uncomfortable. Between 10 and 20 mA, things get serious. That's around the output of an electric fence, and at this level, your muscles can seize up, and letting go is no longer your decision.

From 20 to 50 mA, breathing becomes difficult as muscles spasm. At 50 to 100 mA, roughly the draw of a single LED light bulb, the heart can go into ventricular fibrillation, which is as bad as it sounds. And above 1,000 mA, or 1 amp, the kind of current a standard phone charger pulls, the heart clamps shut entirely and severe burns occur inside and out. The lesson here? Electricity is not something to mess around with.

The most common IT headache culprit? Password chaos. Forgetting passwords, using "password123," or cheerfully handing over login credentials to a very convincing phishing email. Close behind that is accidental file deletion, and then there are the people who dismiss every single software update notification for three years straight and are then baffled when things stop working.

On the hardware side, a surprising number of tech support calls have been resolved by checking whether the device was actually plugged in or whether the batteries in the wireless keyboard were simply out of charge. These aren't dramatic failures. But they are, somehow, the most exhausting ones.

If you've ever looked up at the power lines in a major city and felt a mild sense of anxiety, you are not alone. "Sky spaghetti" is the affectionate slang term for the catastrophic tangle of overhead utility cables that drape across concrete poles in cities around the world. Bangkok, Thailand, is one of the biggest offenders, with poles so loaded with cables that they look like abstract art installations that could end you.

The wires belong to various competing providers, each added over the years with very little coordination and absolutely no plan to clean up after themselves. Electricians who work with these systems are essentially performing archaeology, trying to figure out which cable does what and whether any of them are still live. It is, objectively, a nightmare. But it does make for a very dramatic skyline.

This one is for the travelers. If you land in Europe just to find your American hairdryer not fitting the socket, you've personally experienced the consequence of countries developing their electrical systems in complete isolation from one another. In the early 20th century, as electricity was being rolled out around the world, manufacturers in each country created their own designs with little interest in what others were doing.

Voltage standards, grounding requirements, and safety features all evolved differently depending on where you were, and by the time anyone thought about standardizing things globally, it was far too late. The result? Over 15 different plug types in use around the world today, a thriving international adapter market, and millions of confused tourists every year.

A surge protector can be your last lifeline, but it has a lifespan, and it's quietly counting down right now. Every time a power surge runs through it, the protective components inside absorb the hit and degrade slightly. There's no light that tells you when it's used up. No alarm. It just quietly stops protecting you while still technically powering your devices, giving you a completely false sense of security.

Experts recommend replacing surge protectors every three to five years, or immediately after a significant power event like a lightning strike. So if yours has been living behind your desk since the last decade, doing absolutely nothing visibly wrong, it might be time to have an honest conversation with it about retirement.

Few tech debates have raged longer or more passionately than this one: is it better to leave your computer on all the time, or turn it off when you're done? The answer, it turns out, is frustratingly sensible. If you're stepping away for less than 20 minutes, leave it on; the energy used to keep it running is less than the brief surge it takes to restart.

But if you're heading out for the afternoon, going to bed, or generally won't be back for a while? Turn it off. You'll save energy, reduce heat buildup, and give your machine a good rest. There's no grand winner in this debate, just a practical sliding scale that most people ignore entirely in favor of doing whatever they've always done.