Equipment Failure Quotes

Houston, we've had a problem.

She became confused when she stepped onto an escalator that wasn't working.

One operator is no big deal. That can be fixed in a jiffy.

The pump don't work cause the vandals took the handle

As a navigator, I started studying astronomy because sometimes you're not able to use the equipment, so you'd have to do it the old-fashioned way, figuring out what you were seeing in the sky.

I had an upright - it took me years and years to get enough bread to get it. I'm from Florida, so one morning I woke up, go in the corner, and the bass is in a hundred pieces 'cause the humidity is so bad. I mean, the upright just blew up. I said, 'Forget it, man. I can't afford this anymore.'

Everything on 'Sharknado' somehow, for some reason, something went wrong with everything. The days we had the water towers, they weren't working.

If something goes wrong with my switch, there's no way anyone from Bharti can do anything about it. An Ericsson guy is going to have to come and fix it. I don't manufacture it; I can't maintain or upgrade it. So I'm thinking, 'This doesn't really belong to me. Let's just throw it out.'

Hey anyone who thinks a non-military–grade rappelling cable can support the weight of two grown men and a miniature donkey deserves to fall off a cliff.

Now what do you get in the Army? Bad helmets and Basra. Your guns don't work and everyone hates you when you come back.

I used to get two racquets a year. As you can imagine, they didn't last me too long.

I tell ya, I knew my morning wasn't going right. When I put on my shirt the button fell off, when I picked up my briefcase, the handle fell off, I tell ya, I was afraid to go to the bathroom.

To be honest, everyone thinks that a digital camera is more reliable and every single time I work on any movie, it's just as many problems, the memory card doesn't work or blah blah blah, it overheats; it's the same volume as another camera. I think people are bit taken in by it.

A blown-out tube ripped some of the grind from the amplifier, throwing us into a momentary tizzy. The unusual sound led me to play unusually, and the recorded take turned out to be a keeper. Insriration can come from the most unlikely places ... keep your head on and your ears open.

We gotta do something about this frigging swing set,' he said. 'I'm telling you, it's ninety percent of the problem.

Hey Ridley, that Machometer is acting screwy. It just went off the scale on me.

In a previous life I wrote the software that controlled my physics experiments. That software had to deal with all kinds of possible failures in equipment. That is probably where I learned to rely on multiple safety nets inside and around my systems.

I did wreck a running machine once at Seville. I was only supposed to be doing 12 minutes, but I went on for 15, and it suddenly packed in. I had to hang on to the side to make sure I didn't fall.

Err Houston, we've had a problem. [pause] We've had a main B bus undervolt.

That gets me upset- you're jamming along, checking out the crowd and having a good time, and then your equipment goes down. You can't just stop the show and say, 'Oh, Jeff's got a guitar problem.'

My guitar survived Kosovo, then I went to visit a record company back in London and fell off my motorbike with it on my back, smashing it to bits. I was travelling at two miles per hour.

Gear not working on a live show - that is rough.

When you're in the studio, you've got a narrative for what goes on, you might switch on a bit of gear and it might not work as you intended or come out a bit wrong, and you try and exploit it.

This we had to endure with a serious reduction in the price of goods - added to this early in the ensuing spring our glost oven fell while firing doing us considerable damage and rendering it necessary to build a new one.

I personally don't like to use as many effects because when you play live, something always goes wrong.