I don’t really believe that prominently displaying the dissected corpses of devices that have failed me inspires greater diligence and loyalty in the remaining hardware; but I do it anyway.
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My mantra of “reboot first” goes back to the days of classic Mac OS. I would watch people do these ridiculous workarounds and rituals to avoid rebooting, and then when they lost work or whatever, they’d come to me and ask what the problem was. So much lost productivity. My standard question quickly became, “What happened after you rebooted?”
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Sounds like a typical science lab.
“Why do I have to do this?”
“No idea, but if you don’t the PCR machine will shut down for a week…”
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All I know is that my mother still hits the hard drive to fix it, no matter what I tell her.
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She pulls the hard drive out of the case so she can hit it? Or does she just open up the case and give it a little slap inside?
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He’s a menace, I tell you!
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Thee is no way in hell I am abandoning “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” as my first troubleshooting step when dealing with tech support calls.
It may drive users insane and make them believe I’m patronising them, but I don’t care.
The amount of seemingly serious problems this has fixed for me over the years has taught me that more often than not, I’m right to do it.
Worked a charm for me just this weekend past in fact, when doing so brought a post production customer’s Interplay environment back to life.
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They also lie about doing it. I don’t even ask honestly anymore. I’ll just send their machine a reboot signal while asking them if they tried rebooting. Then when they react say “huh, that’s weird.”
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I don’t even bother asking. I have full remote access to any machine I support, so it’s a few soothing words assuring them I’m on it and I’ll get back to them when it’s fixed. Helps that it’s not desktop support, so they’re not forced to idly twiddle their thumbs, unable to do anything at all until I’m through.
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My main “technology ritual” is stopping to build a small roadside cairn whenever one of my bikes passes 100,000km. Works for me.
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Words to live by: “If in doubt, give it a clout”
Close, it’s “Ataris blow” 
(Amiga forever!)
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I have full remote control too. But I also deal with terrible internet at the locations and sometimes it’s faster to not even start a screen viewing or remote console session and instead just use PSEXEC commands to poke at the thing.
My directive to my wife:
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Safar seems to accumulate RAM in a way that always results in a force quit for me. I’ll have two tabs open and Safari will be using 2G RAM.
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Finding that out is exciting! What, you wanna spend that time working? Pshaw!
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Ferrofluid is awesome. It’s unfortunate that the professionally made stuff is on the pricey side, or I’d really, really, stock up.
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There’s a doodle gif of someone putting a big magnet up against a CRT and the little doodle face gets all worried and scared as the picture gets pushed out of frame by the magnet.
I couldn’t find that one, but that’s what I’d have liked to reply with. Had to settle for the ferrofluid. Which is very cool stuff.
As monitors, I don’t miss a damn thing about CRTs(I was too poor back in the CRT days to have access to the high resolution/fantastic color reproduction gear that had the enthusiasts dismissing early LCD attempts; and those things are heavy, run hot, have purity problems, and consume a lot of power and space); but as tech toys, there was a certain immediacy to the mechanisms within a CRT that LCDs and OLEDs lack.
You could futz around with a magnet and distort the image(just don’t magentize the shadow mask if its a Trinitron…I learned that the hard way…); If you pop the housing open, you can disconnect the control yokes from the driver board and control the electromagnets yourself to move the electron beam around the screen.
Back in high school I had a cruddy old TV I pulled out of the dumpster and drove the control yokes of with the output of a stereo: left channel went to the X axis yoke, right channel went to the Y axis. The resulting patterns looked a lot like Lissajous curves; and changed quite visibly depending on the stereo separation in the music, following a diagonal with X and Y roughly equal if there was minimal separation, moving wildly around if the channels diverged. Pointless; but a neat toy; and not the sort of thing you can just coax an LCD panel driver to do.
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You could probably do the same thing fairly simply in directx, but yeah, the immediacy isn’t there. Also you’d have to learn directx’s api.
