At the defibrillator maker, we joked that if the device didn't work, the patient was dead already...
and that if we shocked into the wrong (ie healthy) waveform, which could cause the heart to fibrillate, we could just shock again into the waveform we had just produced..
At the disk place we joked about users caring where their data went..
At the electronic design place we joked about just needing more capacitance, or a bigger inductor (the idea being that brute forcing a noise problem is simple).
And jest back and forth about whether something was a hardware or software problem. E.g., forgetting to plug something in was a hardware problem.
These may not be as amusing to you as they were to me at the time. YMMV.
