Heres one for ya, this happened to me about 20 years ago.
I work in HVAC.
After working a long day doing service calls till about 10 PM. I get home sit in my seat in the stereo room figuring I'll wind down alone because the wife has gone to bed by now but low and behold in comes my wife and says to me you must have had a hard day and picks up my feet from the foot stool and takes off my shoes and lights me a smoke. She does not smoke and cannot stand it mind you. Says I'll be right back, she returns with dinner and gives it to me also goes and gets me a drink. Kitchen is supposed to be closed at 8:00 and always had before that day. I look at my wife and say, okay what has happened your going way overboard here. The wife looks at me say's Well.... I turned on the stereo and all of a sudden it starts making popping noises, smoking and making pretty color sparks. I ask here did she turn it on as we had agreed and she looks at me with those sad eyes and said "of course, honey!" I even switched all the switches up and down many times trying to make it stop doing those things and I even did that hale Mary thingy you do every time you turn it on! That was a very expensive day. Both the amps and preamp were toast. The mercury on all the tube turned black and 2 output tubes had exploded. I had Audio Research SP6 & 2 D90's bridged for mono mode at the time and always prayed before turning the system on, usually worked for me. In those days AR sounded great but had issue with powering on and tube life.
