I have submitted this to the main site already but some of you were anxious for the story since I started telling it in the comments of another post.
Back in 2011ish I worked at a small computer repair shop and when this happened I was actually asked to sign an NDA about the event, looking back now I don’t really know why. . .
Anyway, a man walked into the shop with a laptop that needed repair, when I took it from him I noticed that the entire bottom panel of the computer was warped and slightly melted, the power port in the back was black.
When I asked him what happened to it he told me he lost the charger and “Modified it” to “Make it work” with a 12v jumper pack that you’d normally use to jump a car with a dead battery. Obviously. . .it didn’t go well and obviously there was nothing I could do, looking back on it now I actually have no way to verify that that’s what actually happened to that PC.
Anyway I pulled the HDD and put it on a test bench/reader to attempt to recover the data. . .nope, dead.
I inform the customer that there is nothing I can do for him as I reassemble his PC as best I can, the drive is dead, everything is burned, it’s beyond my help and I had an inkling that it would have been beyond the help of *anyone * at the shop.
The customer loses it and starts yelling and swearing at me, he says that I’m lying to him and all I want to do is sell him a new computer.
We didn’t sell computers.
This culminated me in calling the security for the facility the shop was operating out of, once I did so he grabbed a full bottle of coke off the counter and whipped it at my face, it hit me cap side first just below the eye.
I responded by throwing his laptop at him as hard as possible, it hit him square in the chest and knocked the wind out of him.
Once security and the police were on site they asked me if I wanted to press charges and I did. Hawaii works on a revolving door so he ended up getting community service and probation or something as he had no prior criminal record.
From that day on we never ran the shop with only one person again.