If it's already broken, might as well try. If it works, great. If not, well, it can't get more broken! And it's a good way to vent.

While not quite "beating the shit out of" someone, this reminded me of advice I've heard about giving CPR (chest compressions, chest compressions, chest compressions). Some people are afraid of doing chest compressions because they might break the person's ribs. The thing is, you cannot make this person's day any worse. They are already dead. If they have no pulse, then the choice is between keeping them dead or trying to bring them back to life with potentially a few broken ribs. Choose the broken ribs. Be a hero.

I love percussive maintenance. 98% of the time my skills for fixing things involve looking at glowing rectangles but very occasionally I get to kick something in juuuuuust the right spot to restart a stuck fan or reseat some connection and that's very satisfying

And it was satisfying. I had a CRT monitor that sometimes collapsed vertically and hitting it on the side a few times generally fixed the problem for a while.

However I discovered percussive maintenance also had limits when I tried it with a 386 that kept freezing because of a bad hard drive. Turns out hitting a computer with a hard drive will make things worse.