Maybe a lot of people here are comparatively pure software people and are surprised, impressed, and grateful when they successfully do technical stuff in the physical world!

When I was a kid, I was already a computer nerd and writing my own programs, yet I had a friend from school who manually replaced his PC speaker (I forgot why, but he did this) that was wired rather than jumped to the motherboard. I was super-impressed, as this felt like a completely out-of-context kind of action to me, like, you can actually physically modify or replace components in your computer!?

Taking a basic bike maintenance class as an adult cyclist was also pretty amazing to me, as there were some actions that seemed mysterious and magical to me that got somewhat demystified (on a machine that I had used every day for years).

I also gave a talk at one point about how side-channel attacks based on physical properties of computers are often so surprising and counterintuitive for software people (including myself) because we so rarely think about how computers are physically instantiated and how that physical instantiation may leak various sensitive information. (In practice, it often does, if you can look at it appropriately.)

I think some people gravitated to software because we love the abstraction and power of "this is an abstract machine" (we don't get to play with formal systems that work automatically in other areas of life). "Wow, it follows arbitrary sequences of formal instructions perfectly!" The refrigerator in the anecdote is, well, not an abstract machine.

As other people in the thread have said, there are places and times where more familiarity with the physical world and physical details of machinery would probably be a lot more routine and less surprising.