It makes sense. They used a 220v power source instead of a 110v one, so they ran into a buffer overflow.

I've got a few stories about PC "techs" too :)

1:
When a friend of mine's old PC went MIA, with some usual beeping sounds, I figured it would be one of the components who had just died. Graphics card was my first guess, and it was a partially accurate guess. It was a problem with the graphics card, alright... but not because it had died, because it had been GLUED to the AGP slot with what seemed to me like thermic glue. Took out the decaying glue, replaced the card on the AGP slot, and everything was working again...

2:
While checking some prices on DDR RAM, at a local shop, me and a couple of friends overheard this conversation between one of the employee's and a custumer. Aparently, the custumer was complaining that the video compressing program he used was compressing his videos with very low quality. The "techs" advice? Buy a stick of 512MB RAM... that should make it compress better. I had to try hard not to laugh... but now I regret that I didn't try to talk to the poor guy, cause he really seemed like he was swallowing all the BS... :(

3:
I didn't witness this one, for it was told to me by a friend. When his PC fried, he took it to the local shop where he bought it. There, the tech opened the PC, took out the graphics card and pointed it towards the light, looking at it like it was a $100 bill, trying to find out if it was fake or not. "What are you doing", the custumer asked. "I'm checking to see if the RAM chips are ok" 0_o

Actually, what is funny is that you guys with your purely SW background do not understand that this is just HW jargon. Even if the sentence is quite lame, it is still correct:

In HW, "a buffered I/O" means you use a "buffer" which is generally an open collector "YES gate" which provides a protection against short circuit thanks to the pull-up resistor which prevents the ground from being directly connected to the Vcc.
This is not completely correct as the protection can be done using serial resistors (most usual) are optocouplers, but it is still a valid sentence from a HW point of view.

The computer science does not revolve around WebDev, I would even say that it is not part of Computer Science. Don't forget that you use something you don't really understand...