About ten years ago, the IT building for a local highschool burned to the ground.
My company donated a spare Juniper EX3200 switch to help get them back online. They had erected a small structure without any insulation, and left the switch inside unpowered for a day while the fiber splicers got them hooked back up.
They started the switch, and it immediately shutdown. They looked a gift horse in the mouth and bitched to us that our donation was garbage.
I was dispatched to assist. I connected to the serial console and powered the device up. It immediately indicated that the CPU temperature was 252 C, and shut itself down.
It was January, the outside temperature was -3 C. The Juniper device was storing temperature as an 8-bit unsigned integer value. It got so cold, it thought it was on fire.
Can’t say I ever expected to use a heat gun to get a switch to start before that day. Got it warm enough to power on, and then it kept itself plenty warm to continue operating.
Data types matter, yo.