Mysterious brown spots and a different kind of mouse support Welcome once again to On-Call, our regular look at the messes readers find themselves in when asked to go to help out their clients. This week, we've heard from Reg reader Pat, who tells us about the time he responded to a request for tech help from a user who was puzzled by the strange behaviour of a printer. "I was minding …
... we griped about mosquitos on the manufacturing floor at Spectra Physics in Mountain View, CA. Went on for a couple weeks. Got to the point where most of us had a couple of the critters tied to the desk with a human-hair leash, taped to the desk. Was pretty funny ... all you had to do was breathe in their general direction and they'd tiredly go airborn & attempt to do what mosquitos do[0].
Manglement finally payed attention when a big-wig from Caterpillar came in to look at the possibility of putting laser-level gear into production Cat kit.
My lead assembler and myself were assigned to track down the source of the problem. Turned out to be a leaking water pipe in the under floor cable-track, pooling in a dip in the concrete. Pipe repaired, water removed with a ShopVac[tm], no more problem.
[0] I'm not normally prone to torment critters who are just doing what they do.
Catch 'em from the front end. Gently. Slip the hair over the back-end, under the wings, and tighten. Gently. Tape the other-end to your desk. Simples.
Or maybe not so simple. We killed thousands of these obnoxious critters perfecting this technique. Remember, we were pissed-off at manglement for trying to ignore the pests, and getting payed for this particular distraction on the assembly line. We had a lot of time to perfect it ;-)
I think he means there was no real way to prevent access to the printer's guts. Mice are determined little critters - they'd wait till he'd left and come back. The only permanent solution would be to provide somewhere warm and suitable nearby. Perhaps providing access to an obsolete PC with cooling issues would do the trick?
My friend had a 386 than ran pretty well, but every so often would spontaneously reboot. You know where this is going -- after this last time it rebooted, he opened the case up, to find a few mice with one pissing on the motherboard. The system was rebooting each time the mice pissed on it. The largest hole in this case was a an open spot where a different motherboard would have had a 9-pin serial port (about the size of a VGA port.)
Once upon a time, our chest freezer started making a God-awful, grinding noise from near the compressor.
After a day or so of this, I peeled off the plastic service cover and discovered that a healthy-sized field mouse had managed to insert its head into the compressor fan. Not a pretty sight.
I'll leave the source of the noises to your imagination. Suffice it to say that the fan needed dismounting and a bloody good cleaning before it could go back into service.
I guess he was attracted to the radiant warmth of the very hot compressor tank, scalded by it and while fleeing, inadvertently decapitated himself. Talk about a better mouse trap.......
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