Pro tip: That one Tuesday where I fixed three PS4s in a row gave me a weird superpower

Honestly, last Tuesday was the weirdest day I've had in years. I had three PS4s come in all with the same HDMI port issue, like someone hit copy and paste on the same problem. First one took me about an hour with the hot air station and some flux, but the solder pads were lifting and I had to run jumper wires. Second one was a different revision with a tiny capacitor shorted near the port that I almost missed. Third one was a straight swap with zero drama, which felt like a gift from the repair gods. By the end of the day my eyes were crossing and my hands were shaking from the coffee, but I cleared the whole backlog. Has anyone else had a day where one specific fault just keeps rolling in? I swear I dreamt about HDMI pins that night.

2 comments

2 Comments

the_rose1mo ago

Jumped right into that HDMI nightmare and felt every word of it. I had a stretch where I was swapping out busted hard drives on the same model of laptop like it was a factory job, and I started seeing platter patterns every time I blinked. There's something weirdly hypnotic about doing the same repair over and over, your hands just know what to do and your brain goes on autopilot. That dream about HDMI pins is way too real, I've had dreams about scrubbing corrosion off circuit boards with a toothbrush.

lisar141mo ago

OMG I had a friend who got so deep into replacing laptop batteries for a summer that he'd wake up in the middle of the night mumbling about voltage ratings! He said his hands would just start doing the disconnect procedure on random objects like his coffee mug.