[indrora]

A tale I use in interviews is "The Homesick Laptop's Replacement Desktop That Ate Hard Drives in Summer".

long story short, Dell ship-of-theseus'd an entire machine looking for an issue that only happened on cloudy-hot days when the disks were under high load. It was an air conditioner out of phase with the rest of the system causing EMI that the power supply just let on through.

[Night_Thastus]

Reminds me of something I had to deal with in my audio system.

I was getting an awful buzzing/static sound in my speakers. I went through my chain one at a time un-plugging them and seeing if the noise went away or didn't.

As it turns out, my PC's video card was barfing electrical noise through every port...including the ethernet port. Unfortunately I didn't know the difference between shielded and shielded twisted pair and had used shielded by mistake.

That shielded twisted pair allowed the noise to go out of my GPU, into the motherboard, through the ethernet port, then down to my ethernet switch. From there, the switch connected to the raspberry pi I used for streaming, where it helpfully forwarded that noise straight into the DAC and therefore the rest of the chain.

I tell you, that drove me nuts!