History NotTheIntendedUse / Other

* Under Australian consumer law, you are entitled to a refund or replacement if an item you purchased is not fit for its intended purpose. This obviously means the task it was originally designed for, but also, if you conveyed a different purpose to the person you bought it from, and it's not suitable for ''that'' purpose, you are still entitled to a refund/replacement. [[DefiedTrope This is why]] many products on Australian shelves, particularly dangerous ones such as poisonous cleaners, weed killer, and pest control items include usage and safety directions on the packaging, along with [[OurLawyersAdvisedThisTrope "Not to be used in any manner, or for any purpose contrary to this label without authorization."]]

** In the same vein, Unreal Engine was created with the main purpose of being used to develop 3D games. However TV production houses found that they could just use it to create virtual sets and composite their actors into it, saving them a ton of money and time in the process. One notable example of this was the children's TV series ''Series/LazyTown'' where it was used to render the virtual sets alongside a framework called [=XRGen4=]. Epic later went on to incorporate workflows for film and television productions in subsequent incarnations of the Unreal Engine.

* Game controllers are cheap, easy to use and are familiar to younger generations. This is precisely the reason why the US military utilised them for controlling things like UAV drones as it would be easier to train rookie soldiers using something they already had experience with (which has unsurprisingly led to some controversy as some found this rather video-gamey way of killing enemy combatants ''VideoGame/CallOfDuty'' style in RealLife to be of extremely poor taste). In 2023 it has been pointed out that the ''Titan'' submersible involved in an [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Titan_submersible_incident incident]] where they went missing whilst attempting to explore the remains of the UsefulNotes/RMSTitanic used an off-the-shelf Logitech G F710 game controller, a $40 joypad they might have snatched off [=GameStop=] or some other electronics store and modified for submersible use.

* Game controllers are cheap, easy to use and are familiar to younger generations. This is precisely the reason why the US military utilised them for controlling things like UAV drones as it would be easier to train rookie soldiers using something they already had experience with (which has unsurprisingly led to some controversy as some found this rather video-gamey way of killing enemy combatants ''VideoGame/CallOfDuty'' style in RealLife to be of extremely poor taste). In 2023 it has been pointed out that the ''Titan'' submersible involved in an [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Titan_submersible_incident incident]] where they went missing whilst attempting to explore the remains of the UsefulNotes/RMSTitanic.

* Apple's Face ID feature of their [=iPhones=] is intended as a biometric system lock. However, it's also one of the most effective pieces of software on the market for identifying and tracking facials features, and buying a secondhand [=iPhone=] is a lot cheaper than licensing standalone software and the hardware to run it. This makes Face ID ''de rigueur '' for many a VirtualYouTuber to translate their expressions and movements to their on-screen avatars. This does have one drawback, though: since the incredibly sophisticated facial recognition was intended to only be used for a few seconds at a time it guzzles battery power with abandon, depending on their setup some [=VTubers=] have to cap their stream length as the phone slowly goes flat even while plugged in.

* Professional Video Monitors, or [=PVMs=] for short, were originally meant to be professional equivilants to television sets, most often found in broadcast control rooms and on video editing setups. These had significantly more crisp displays than a standard consumer TV and could natively accept an RGB signal instead of the usual composite or RF signal, allowing for the best possible picture clarity and removing the color inconsistencies and limited depth that a composite or S-video cable came with. This was an essential part in ensuring the master copy you were editing was producing the correct colors. Following the demise of CRT technology and the rise of HD, the need for these in the professional realm fell quickly, but the displays found a second lease on life in the retro gaming community thanks to the fact that RGB-capable displays never caught on in the US. In addition, many retro consoles look better on a CRT screen than they do on a modern HD TV, and the PVM outclasses a standard CRT TV from the same era, and thanks to the fact that many old consoles can be modified to output RGB, they have become quite popular and sought after for this purpose.

** [[Administrivia/RuleOfCautiousEditingJudgment Without delving too deeply into the ideologies behind it]], a lot of modern day alternative and holistic medicine practices and fad healthcare trends revolve around this principal by using medicines for ailments outside of their common application such as using the appetite reducing and insulin stimulating effects of Diabetes medication to stimulate weight loss or using diuretics and water pills to assist with body toning by reducing water weight. Given these practices are often done without or even in spite of consultation with a medical professional, it's unclear how beneficial these techniques actually are versus the risk involved.

*** And in a '''[[ExaggeratedTrope third]]''' example, benadryl taken in high doses leads to [[MushroomSamba vivid hallucinations]], which has lead to use as a recreational drug.

** Cough medicine works not by soothing your throat, but by shutting down the cough reflex in your brain. Taking cough syrup in excessive doses produces a psychoactive effect on par with illegal street drugs. The reason cough syrup isn't illegal in spite of this is because there's no other known way to medically treat a cough. Plus, the taste is downright nasty, being bitter enough to make some people vomit from it. Though neither the taste nor its price stopped it from being hailed as a status symbol by some in the HipHop community, specifically for the psychoactive effect. The cocktail known as "purple drank" is a mixture of codeine cough syrup mixed into Sprite with hard candy to dull the bitter flavour.

* AK-47 magazines make excellent bottle openers. So do the iron sights of several missile launchers. People have used them so much (damaging the magazine) that some later weapons such as the IMI Galil rifle included actual bottle openers as part of their decorations[[note]]in the Galil's case, the ferrule at the back of the handguard which normally retains the bipod when it's not deployed[[/note]] to prevent loss of combat efficiency.

* The Willys MB Jeep was originally intended to be a rugged and reliable non-combat transport vehicle during UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, having been an iconic fixture of the war, and was subject to various field modifications in ways far beyond the original designers intended, such as "a power plant, light source, improvised stove for field rations, or a hot water source for shaving", though given the conditions it was subjected to, it is to no surprise that troops would {{MacGyver|ing}} their jeeps to their needs. And then there was a bunch of Filipinos who, faced with the fact that their transport infrastructure was utterly destroyed by the war, took those surplus Jeeps, modified and stretched them to accommodate several passengers, and decorated these ex-military vehicles in the most [[{{Camp}} campy]] way imaginable, giving rise to the Jeepney. Japanese scale model firm Tamiya would later commemorate them in 2019 with the "Dyipne", a Toys/Mini4WD kit inspired by the vehicle.
* The [=MIM-104 Patriot=], which entered service in 1981 as a Long-Range Anti-Air Missile, was being used in 1991 as an Anti-Ballistic Missile. This decision went terribly to the point that the Patriot's early reputation is still marred by controversy. For starters, the Patriot was strictly meant for destroying aircraft. But the Scud missiles they were intended to intercept were traveling at higher speeds than manned aircraft, often causing the Patriot to completely miss or detonate harmlessly behind the tail of the Scuds. Second, Ballistic Missile Defense was a completely unproven concept at the time which meant that the U.S. military was literally reaching blindly with absolutely no experience or guarantees of success which was not helped by the fact that the Patriot was also unproven in combat. And lastly, the Patriot's Radar System had defective software which led to phantom targets being detected and fired on or incoming tracks being detected and lost because, as a result of a flaw in the internal clock and 24-bit programming being incapable of handling very minute numbers like one-third, the radar looked in the wrong area. The defective software resulted in the Dhahran barracks being successfully hit by a Scud, killing 28 American soldiers, and still stands as a black mark on the Patriot's service record. Today, the Patriot is capable of fulfilling its role as an Anti-Ballistic Missile but only because of the lessons learned from its mistakes and failures.

* Raw cookie dough. This has actually come up in the news, when there was a case of people eating packaged cookie dough raw - and getting food poisoning from it, despite the package containing a warning regarding the consumption of raw eggs (which the packaged cookie dough contained). The resulted in a more strongly worded warning on future packages. Other companies, upon seeing a demand for cookie dough intended to be eaten raw, have created the eggless cookie dough intended to be eaten as such.

* The Roland TB-303 Bass Line was a sequencer/synthesizer combo meant to replace the bass guitar in mainstream rock bands, which it did a terrible job of with it's weird, squelchy sound that's closer to a mouth harp than any string instrument. After it commercially bombed and was quickly discontinued, cheap second-hand units found their way to musicians who realized you could make it sound even ''more'' weird and squelchy by tweaking its knobs while it was playing a sequence, which sounded very distinct from any other instrument or synthesizer. This sound was the basis for Phusion's ''Acid Tracks'' in 1987, which lead to the birth of the Acid House genre, and made the TB-303 a staple of ElectronicDanceMusic.

* [[https://www.amazon.com/Hillman-Group-370326-Plastic-100-Pack/dp/B000H5WVCS #4-8 x 7/8 inch plastic wall anchors]] are designed to be used in light construction work by preventing damage to drywall or wood when tightening screws. As it turns out, however, these little plastic anchors are also the ''perfect'' size to fit inside a .22 Long Rifle firearm's chamber, and many gun owners buy these anchors for use as snap caps so that they can safely dry fire their guns without damaging the firing pin. Many of the reviews for this product on the link above aren't even construction related, but are actually from gun owners attesting how great they work as snap caps.[[labelnote:note]]Especially since the wall anchors are less than four dollars for 100 of them, while ''actual'' .22 LR snap caps can cost around twenty times that much, and the wall anchors can take more firing pin strikes before becoming uselessly damaged whereas the snap caps tend to deform after only one to four strikes.[[/labelnote]]

** More advanced modern bombs with their own guidance systems make it easier, but it's still not expected or common for many of the same reasons as with regular unguided bombs, which is why it's so distinctive that the F-15E, a strike fighter variant of the F-15 Eagle, made its only air-to-air kill with a laser-guided bomb against a helicopter gunship. Even then, it only happened because they were intending to hit the gunship before it took off, but decided to hold the guidance laser on it as it lifted off just to see if it would work anyway.

** Microsoft Excel may just be the software king of this trope, it has been used for everything from letter-writing (instead of Microsoft Word? Why? Because the grids make it easier to align the text!) to filing taxes (screw Quicken!) to even being used as a ''[[https://www.cnet.com/news/play-an-rpg-made-in-excel/ game engine]]''!.

* Pirated repacks of computer games, e.g. those from [=FitGirl=] and DODI, are a convenient avenue for those wanting to pirate the latest titles without having to wait so much due to less-than-ideal internet connections as they are compressed to at least half or a third of the game's original install size, though they do take significantly longer to install due to aggressive use of compression. While downloading them is still not without its risk due to their less-than-legal nature, some who did buy the games on services like Steam or the Epic Games Store but are hampered by slow or limited connections simply downloaded the repacks and unpacked their contents on the folder where the legitimate copies are to be installed, thereby rendering them as legal copies. Indeed, [=FitGirl=] opined that while they[[note]]It is unknown if the person is actually female or is merely using a [[{{GIRL}} feminine persona]][[/note]] are well-aware of the risks involved in their unofficial game distributions, game publishers could learn a lesson or two in how to properly update games without having to re-download large portions of the game.

* Anti-materiel rifles [[ShapedLikeItself are designed to be anti-materiel]], i.e. effective at destroying military equipment. However, their high caliber and high precision also made them very effective at dispatching combatants from a very long range. Many of the longest recorded sniper kills have been made with rifles that would have been considered anti-materiel rifles rather than general sniper rifles.
** The predecessor of the anti-materiel rifle was the anti-tank rifle which itself was descended from the Elephant gun. During World War I, Britain and Germany employed Elephant guns from their African colonies to try and break up the stalemate. German snipers got a nasty surprise when the large protective plates they used to advance towards the allied lines (10mm thick steel that was virtually immune to all small-arms, including rifles) were being punched through by British counter-snipers. And when the Mark I tank began appearing, Germany deployed the Mauser 1918 T-Gewehr, the first dedicated anti-tank rifle, specifically to counter it.
** One also notes that there are fewer differences between a sniper rifle and a machine gun than one would expect, as both are heavy weapons with long barrels. A few countries even adopted what were intended as machine guns and use them as designated marksman's rifles instead, including Britain's L86 and Germany's [=G8A1=], and there's also the famous story of US Marine sniper Carlos Hathcock and his scoped [=M2HB=], with which he made what was the longest-distance kill ever made for 35 years before his record was broken by Canadian snipers at the start of the War on Terror - who, it should be noted, were using sniper rifles with very large bullets designed precisely because Hathcock showed that .50 BMG and similarly-large bullets were perfect for sniping at extremely long ranges.

* Pirated repacks of computer games, e.g. those from [=FitGirl=] and DODI, are a convenient avenue for those wanting to pirate the latest titles without having to wait so much due to less-than-ideal internet connections as they are compressed to at least half or a third of the game's original install size, though they do take significantly longer to install due to aggressive use of compression. While downloading them is still not without its risk due to their less-than-legal nature, some who did buy the games on services like Steam or the Epic Games Store but are hampered by slow or limited connections simply downloaded the repacks and unpacked their contents on the folder where the legitimate copies are to be installed, thereby rendering them as legal copies.

* Microsoft Excel may have been designed as an accounting and spreadsheet program, but it can be used to classify and organize all kinds of things. As just one example, historians may use Excel to organize, classify and summarize research materials. Taking it UpToEleven, one Tumblr user's grandmother found a [[http://i.imgur.com/hZFvwVm.jpg completely different use for it]] - designing knitting patterns.

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* On Wiki/ThisVeryWiki, the AC markup is intended for headers. However, some folks, noticing that it uses "small caps" formatting, used it for some stylistic purposes. This was put to an end when the AC markup was modified to force linebreaks before and after the formatted text.

** Speaking of spoilers, spoiler-tagging (surrounding text with "||" marks, causing the text to be masked until clicked on) is used not just for spoilers, but also accompanied with {{trigger}}/{{squick}}/other-sensitive-content warnings so that other users don't expose themselves to such text by mistake.

* Website/YouTube began life as a simple video sharing site for users to upload their own videos onto -- at least, until people figured out "their own videos" could also mean copyrighted material that they happened to have a compatible video file of, as well as still-framed or lyric videos intended to show off the audio instead. While there still is a lot of user-generated videos on the site, a good chunk of them are more for collecting the same user's content on other user-generated content sites and compiling them on [=YouTube=] as backup.

* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_cut_effect curb cut effect]] refers to a feature that was originally meant to improve accessbility for those with disabilities, but which ends up being appreciated by other people as well. Once abled people notice the benefits, the feature ends up becoming more common and normalized, which is a win for both disabled and abled people.

* Twitter:

** One also notes that there are fewer differences between a sniper rifle and a machine gun than one would expect, as both are heavy weapons with long barrels. A few countries even adopted what were intended as machine guns and use them as designated marksman's rifles instead, including Britain's L86 and Germany's [=G8A1=], and there's also the famous story of US Marine sniper Carlos Hathcock and his scoped [=M2HB=], with which he made what was the longest-distance kill ever made for 35 years before his record was broken by Canadian snipers at the start of the War on Terror.