Gotta love user reported bugs. I had one that reported a product of ours crashed only on Mondays. We spent a total of 5 minutes thinking of a cause and appointed customer support for a Friday morning. Lo and behold the app still crashed.

In this case the app only crashed on Mondays... because that's when this user actually used the application

User reported bugs can be wild. I had one where the user was tapping a button repeatedly so fast that the UI was not keeping up with the code and would no longer sync certain values properly. I'm talking like tap the button 15 times in a second. Another issue involved flipping back and forth between the same page like 10 times then turn the device Bluetooth off and immediately back on.

Before we had mindblown emoji, we had this.

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Why would you post this, my phone exploded and took a shit. I didnt know it could do that.

Lmao, yeah.... You can make a can so secured a bear definitely won't get in; but will people go to the effort to use it then?

Definitely some overlap there.

My favourite story about aircraft design about some of the design mistakes on the F-16 fighter.

The F-16 was the first fly-by-wire fighter. They didn't have much experience with it, and tried out some new things. One was that instead of having a stick between the legs of the pilot they used a side stick. And, since everything was fly-by-wire they didn't need the stick to mechanically move. They decided they'd just use a solid stick with pressure transducers, since it was simpler and more reliable than a stick that moved.

The trouble was that the pilots couldn't estimate how much pressure they were using. This led to the pilots over-rotating on take-off (pulling back too hard). Even funnier was that at early airshows, when the pilots were doing a high-speed roll, you could see the control surfaces twitching with the heartbeat of the pilots as they shoved the stick as hard as they could to get maximum roll.

That led to them adding a small amount of give to the stick, essentially giving the pilots feedback on how hard they were pushing the control surfaces.

Another more subtle issue with the design was that originally the stick was set up for forward, back, left and right aligned with the axes of the plane itself. But, they discovered that when pilots pulled back on the stick, they were pulling slightly towards themselves, causing the plane to also roll. So, they realigned it so that "pulling back" is slightly pulling towards the pilot's body, rather than directly along the forward / backward axis of the plane.

Id hardly call that a user fucking things up, that's not even good on paper. Those are a retarded pair of things to have next to one another regardless of any coloring on them. Especially with the same handles

It doesn't matter if a human can't, some idiot is going to open an autoclicker at 1000cps and break it

Was it Jen? She was entrusted to take care of the Internet by Roy and Moss, and she did a piss-poor job of it.

Yes! I remember this happening a lot, and I could never really truly understand the thought process behind it! But the thing is, this is still happening today, just in different context, and it's still equally as baffling!

“Huh, I wonder” has been driving general scientific progress and heart failures in engineering since forever.

I was a QA engineer. I think one of the guys on the team I was on developed a stress response from hearing me walk over to his desk.

Lots of "page crashes if the user doesn't have a last name"

"Why wouldn't they have a last name??"

"No idea, but 372 users in the DB don't, and 20 of them were created this month so it's not an old problem"

"incoherent muttering and cursing"

I've seen multiple new users drag Macintosh HD or Documents to Trash in literally the first minute of using a computer. It was perhaps the most common first action I witnessed. Fortunately, none of them located the "Empty Trash" command before I stepped in.

It never crashed the system, but this was in the 90s when we were already on System 7 or even OS 8, so I'm not sure how the older versions handled it. Dragging a disk icon to the Trash on the classic Mac OS ejected the disk, so I wouldn't be surprised. Simply dragging the System Folder shouldn't cause an instant crash, but it would fail to boot if you restarted for sure. So the story could be mostly accurate but just missing a step.