Keyboards, phones and liquid ingress, oh my
I've come across a few terrible BT slice-and-dice wiring jobs in my time, however sometimes they've required a little 'fettling' to be deemed consistently faulty enough to warrant the FOC Openreach visit. In one case, all it needed was to have been jelly crimped properly in the first place, but cheap crimps, water ingress, outdoor jumper box fallen into disrepair... Poor show all round really.
I'm not perfect. I once spilled nearly a pint of orange juice into my fairly new MS Natural Keyboard Elite. This was the original model, made in Mexico, without the hotkeys (and shipped with a USB adapter for the brave early adopters amongst us).
Surprisingly, after tipping out most of the juice, taking it apart, wiping down the boards and letting it all dry, the thing worked perfectly for another decade until the left Ctrl and Shift keys slowly started to fail. I still have it, but it was retired in favour of a Topre switched TKL. I can't quite bring myself to throw it away, it's a neatly engineered design and is still my favourite keyboard shape.
Better yet, I was installing a toilet once and using an old work iPhone as a light source. Later that day after the grout had sealed, I managed to idiotically drop said phone-torch in to the toilet just after test flushes but before it 'entered service'. Top five of my all-time idiotic moments. Promptly retrieved, but still got a dunking, though fortunately not all the way to the bottom speaker and mic grilles. It also had a Mophie fitted which may have protected it a bit.
The phone was powered off and buried for three days in a sealed container of rice and silica beads on the windowsill. And on next boot... perfect operation! So thank you tight manufacturing tolerances, because I cba with the hassle of sorting out a new work phone - it would have been an old stock model anyway.
The phone is now nearing the end of its natural lifespan, and the Mophie has decided it can't recharge the phone (though passthrough still works), but that's the extent of it. The Mophie probably would have packed up anyway by now given the amount of impacts it's had.
These stories have nothing on the workplace stuff though. Coffee spilled into a brand new mixing desk then left unreported for a week was an amusing anecdote told by a colleague (upon cracking it open, the affected cards were covered in various forms of life). Though some of the most painful (and expensive) stories are the ones involving genuine accidental damage.
And finally, no harm done except bruised pride: I once gently explained to a journalist that the reason her iPhone interview recordings sounded so bad was because she was holding the phone with the main microphone pointing 180° from her subjects. The reason the on-screen interface was still upside down was because she had rotation lock engaged.