Laptop RAM failed ...then worked?

My work laptop is an Alienware 15 laptop with two sticks of 16GB DDR4 GSkill laptop RAM. Today at work out of boredom, I took the bottom panel off of the laptop. I then removed one of the 16GB sticks of RAM, fondled her a bit for no reason, then put the stick back in. Shortly after re-insertion I realized that I hadn't turned the laptop off prior to removing the stick of RAM. So, in my head I was thinking "Darn, I might have to force the computer to shut down after I put the screw back in". Regardless of whether or not it's okay to take out a stick of RAM and put it back in while a computer is sleeping, I knew that there was a decent chance that the laptop hadn't fully gone to sleep, and that regardless, what I had done might end up necessitating a power cycle in order to restore functionality. However, I wasn't really nervous about any of this at this time. It was just kind of a "oh, I should've probably turned it off first" moment. Anyway, I open up the laptop and sure enough the screen is black and I have no control. I then held the power button to force a shutdown, but when I booted her back up I got a black screen and 3 or 4 beeping sounds. At this point I got a little nervous, but I assumed that I just hadn't secured the RAM sufficiently, so I took the bottom back off, unplugged both sticks and plugged them back in. BEEP, BEEP, BEEP. Now this is where it gets weird: After attempting to boot from each sticks individually, I determined that one of the sticks (we'll call it "stick B") had gone bad because the laptop would boot from stick A just fine. But out of curiosity I plugged stick A into the other RAM slot and attempted the boot. I got a black screen and beeps. At this point I assumed that it was the RAM slot on the mobo that was failing. But, once again out of curiosity, I plugged stick B (the one I had previously presumed to be dead) into the slot that I was now suspicious about, and I got a black screen and beeps. At this point I was so confused that I took out stick B, set it on a notepad next to stick A, left the laptop open, and just sorta sat down in a chair and stared at the wall. After a few minutes I plugged both sticks back in and turned on the laptop. It booted fine. Windows recognized all 32GB and everything was like normal.

How?