THEY ASKED FOR THE PASSWORD BACK AND FOUND

They asked for the password back and found the real problem wasn't the computer, it was everything on it.

A poster says they had lent a computer to an ex, then later asked for the password after the relationship had ended. The request itself was simple enough. The catch was what was waiting inside that machine: years of work the poster had left behind.

The poster says, "I'm laughing at this," but the laugh comes with a list of things now locked away behind someone else's login. "there's years of circuits I've built, CADD drawing's for my projects, and lots of research," they wrote.

That meant the computer wasn't just a borrowed device. It was a repository for the poster's own projects, circuit work, design files, and research accumulated over years. The password question suddenly turned into a scramble to recover access to material that belonged to the poster but lived on the ex's computer.

The poster doesn't describe a dramatic confrontation or a big argument. Instead, the story lands on the quiet sting of realizing how much had been stored in one place without a backup. After seeing what was on the machine, the poster boiled the whole thing down to one line: "Learned my lesson, save to the cloud."

It's a small exchange on the surface, one person asking an ex for a password, but the stakes were all in what that password protected. A computer loaned out for convenience had become the home for years of the poster's own circuits, CADD drawings, and research, and getting it back meant confronting the cost of not saving copies elsewhere.