Dive into the wildest Reddit tech support gore where a furious parent attempted to saw a school Chromebook in half. A hilarious takeaway for all devs.
Sup fellow code monkeys. I was mindlessly scrolling Reddit while waiting for my code to compile, and I stumbled upon a post so unhinged I just had to bring it to Coding4Food for y'all. If you've worked in IT Support or Helpdesk, you're probably used to users spilling coffee on keyboards or deleting System32. But this? This is next-level chaos: A Chromebook completely obliterated by a literal handsaw.
The story was shared by a fellow IT warrior on the r/techsupportgore sub. The drama started when a stubborn parent went full boomer and refused to sign the school's acceptable-use policy, strictly forbidding their kid from bringing any "school tech" into the house.
But the kid, being an absolute rebel, sneaked a Chromebook out of the charging cart anyway. When the parent found out? Instead of just confiscating it or returning it to the school, they opted for the most medieval debugging method possible: grabbing a saw and trying to cut the device in half to "solve the problem."
The result? A completely mangled Chromebook. The tech support team, completely clueless at first, was handed this tech corpse after the fact. Overwhelmed by the sheer absurdity of the user, the IT department did the only rational thing: they mounted it on the wall like a museum exhibit.
The comment section was an absolute goldmine of IT folks and Reddit sleuths. Here's what the community had to say:
phideltjason) clarified that this wasn't just a simple "pay for the damage" situation. All the i's were dotted and t's were crossed, and the authorities (Child Protective Services, allegedly) were called. Because honestly, taking a saw to a laptop isn't exactly a sign of a stable household.Kivulini hit the nail on the head. They suspected the kid probably got bad grades, and the parent went nuclear on the device as punishment, completely ignoring (or not caring) that it was school property. Pure chaos.aroundincircles criticized the parent's sawing technique. "It doesn't look like they actually tried very hard. I feel like I could get through a Chromebook in a few seconds, depending on which tool I used to cut it with. (though I would take out the battery first)."Being in IT is truly a thankless job. When we push a bug to prod, we can at least roll back or push a hotfix. Even if our hosting architecture crashes, we can spin up a backup. But when a user applies physical melee damage to your hardware, there's no Ctrl+Z.
If there's anything we can learn from this, it's that users are the most unpredictable entities in the universe. Whether you're building an app or designing a system, remember to idiot-proof your work. We worry about SQL injections, but out in the wild, users are out here attacking systems with literal hand tools!
Source: Reddit - The Chromebook That A Student's Parent Attempted To Saw In Half