Every child has tried to use the above excuse for how a vase or glass turned into a collection of shards. If you’ve been around PCs, you may have heard the same words as explanation for why someone’s computer is no longer working.
Well … in the case of a PC, “it just broke” may be absolutely true!
No mechanical device (hard drive, fan, power supply, etc.) can be made to work forever. In fact, hardware manufacturers include a guess about when a device might “break” on its own. This guess is called the MTBF (or “mean time between failures”).
In essence, the manufacturers acknowledge that things break down and that “it just broke” is a legitimate description of what happened. As a computer support person, you just have to get used to this fact.
