back to article Computers shouldn't smoke. Cigarettes aren't healthy for anyone

Welcome again to On-Call, our series in which readers share memories of nasty jobs they've been asked to do. On-Call usually appears on Friday, but Easter means nobody will be around to read it. So here we are on Thursday. This week, reader “George” tells us, “Many years ago I was a PC repair tech at a small computer store, …

  1. David Roberts

    New motherboard and memory?

    Should have thrown in a case and PSU as well, given the overall cost.

    Then just moved the HDD across.

    Save all the time spent cleaning up.

    1. DropBear

      Re: New motherboard and memory?

      Preferably one of those that have actual air filters installed...

      1. jelabarre59

        Re: New motherboard and memory?

        Preferably one of those that have actual air filters installed...

        At one time I thought that should become standard equipment on all systems, then I realized a lot (most) users wouldn't ever think of checking/cleaning them. Leading to a lot *more* overheated power supplies and systems.

    2. JimmyPage Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: New motherboard and memory?

      I still have my grandfathers ax. I changed the shaft and my Dad changed the head .....

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

  2. McShufts

    Used to work at a certain second hand chain that rhymes with tex. You could always tell the chain smokers by the browny green gunk with a yellow tinge coming out of the fans. They always got arsey when you told them to go away and clean it.

  3. chrishansenhome
    Mushroom

    Keyboard hell

    When I was working in New York years ago, we had a user who was quite a chain smoker. (This was long before smoking in offices was prohibited.) He had a particular problem with keyboards--he went through them in about 6 months. The office continued to provide him with new keyboards, but after a while the management asked me to investigate. I took his last borked keyboard and turned it over. A cloud of fine grey dust floated down to the desk. He had been exhaling quite close to the keyboard and what escaped from his lungs did not escape from the keyboard. He was asked to smoke outside.

    1. waldo kitty
      Pirate

      Re: Keyboard hell

      A cloud of fine grey dust floated down to the desk. He had been exhaling quite close to the keyboard and what escaped from his lungs did not escape from the keyboard.

      that was more likely just ashes that fallen off into the keyboard instead of the ash tray... smoke doesn't hang around like that ;)

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

        1. PNGuinn
          Stop

          Re: Keyboard hell @ Symon

          "Give him an IBM model M ... "

          Not MY model M (wishes he had one...) and definitely NOT MY dishwasher

          1. This post has been deleted by its author

            1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

              Re: Keyboard hell

              No it isn't, it's Alt 156?

              1. Ugotta B. Kiddingme

                Re: Keyboard hell (@Binky)

                Alt-0163 and Alt-156 with BOTH produce the '£' sign.

                1. Peter2 Silver badge

                  Re: Keyboard hell (@Binky)

                  If you are British then you buy the IBM Model M, UK Layout which has the pound sign on it.

                  I know, because i'm typing this on one.

                  1. Alan Brown Silver badge

                    Re: Keyboard hell (@Binky)

                    And if you cant have a model M, get yourself a Cherry G80

                2. This post has been deleted by its author

                3. Eddy Ito
                  Trollface

                  Re: Keyboard hell (@Binky)

                  Huh, I always used Alt-412, Alt-0675, Alt-924 or Alt-01187. It's all very odd, if only there was a known pattern to it.

                4. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

                  Re: Keyboard hell (@Binky)

                  It's definitely Fake Friday. I misread 0163 as 163. You're quite right, 0163 is fine.

            2. Fibbles

              Re: Keyboard hell

              Why go on ebay when you can buy a new one?

            3. jelabarre59

              Re: Keyboard hell

              I have about 10 Model-M keybords around the house. Doesn't seem to like working with my USB-based KVM though (once I put the PS2-USB adapter on it).

        2. Bluto Nash

          Re: Keyboard hell

          Oh, HELL no. various levels of) While a Model M will certainly survive that and more, that's the user you give the $5 OEM keyboard, not a good one.

      2. I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects

        Re: Keyboard hell

        > smoke doesn't hang around like that

        Damp smoke does in cold weather with high humidity as for example weather just prior to a line-storm. It turns into mildew where that condenses. I imagine that was the priciple cause of tuberculosis in the late 1930s until the clean air act.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Keyboard hell

      Back in the day *before* PCs (yes, I am that old) I shared a terminal with heavy smoker.

      After he'd used it I would have to turn the keyboard upside-down and bang it to shake out the bits of rollie and beard...

    3. jcitron

      Re: Keyboard hell

      That sound like it was dropped ashes inside and not exhaled smoke that were causing the problem. Since the ashes are carbon, and carbon is conductive though resistive, it will cause little circuit shorts across the etches.

      1. The First Dave

        Re: Keyboard hell

        You're getting confused with soot - that is (fairly) pure carbon, but ashes should be anything BUT carbon: whatever trace minerals were in the baccy and paper.

    4. Mark 85

      Re: Keyboard hell

      We didn't have much of an issue with smokers but eaters... I've found chicken bones (the small ones) chunks of sandwich, cookies (biscuits to you in the UK), and other assorted items, usually in blue or green fur hosting a civilization. After a couple of months of cleaning keyboards we started tossing them in the bin although they probably should have went in the one marked "Haz-Mat".

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    machine brought in in a garbage bag

    While working at a small mom-n-pop computer place doing the usual sales, new builds, and repairs/upgrades, we had a customer bring their machine in for repair. They had the machine in one of those Hefty<tm> garbage bags. Hummm... So it was signed in on a repair ticket and placed in the repair center on the shelf.

    A day or two later, one of the techs (moi) took the system off the shelf and started to open it on the workbench. A sudden cringing thought came to mind regarding why this machine was bagged like it was so out the back door we went with another tech or three and several cans of bug spray. Someone gingerly opened the bag and started to work it down off the machine when hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of German Cockroaches came swarming out. Cue the bug spray and someone quickly wrapping the machine back up in its bag, sealing it with tape and then it was left there to cook in the sun for days. This was in the summer and we were having quite wonderful (not) F100+ degree days. It still took over a week for those bastards to cook and die.

    Later on, another tech was able to open the bag and remove the machine so they could attempt to diagnose and repair it. They found that the inside was filled with Boric Acid. No, the machine was never repaired. In fact, it never came back into the shop without being in its protective bag.

    The customer was given numerous options that all ended up with a whole new machine being the solution. They were also warned that every other computer shop with a 50 mile radius would be notified to be on the lookout if they decided to take this machine elsewhere for repair.

    Anonymous because I still have nightmares about those roaches crawling up out of that bag, the company is still around somewhere and everyone in the area knows the story.

    1. GrumpenKraut
      Coat

      Re: machine brought in in a garbage bag

      Gasp! But

      > ...and hundreds of German Cockroaches came swarming out.

      how could you tell? Did the march in ranks or had tiny Pickelhauben on their heads?

      Mine is the one with the bags full of pyrethrum ----->

      1. WonkoTheSane
        Trollface

        Re: machine brought in in a garbage bag

        Nope, the top of the PC was covered in little towels!

      2. Mpeler
        Boffin

        Re: machine brought in in a garbage bag

        No, they were all reading c't. :)

      3. waldo kitty
        Boffin

        Re: machine brought in in a garbage bag

        Gasp! But

        > ...and hundreds of German Cockroaches came swarming out.

        how could you tell?

        you simply look at them... Blattella germanica are quite different from American cockroaches (Periplaneta americana), Oriental cockroaches (Blatta orientalis), Wood roaches, Florida's flying roaches (aka Eurycotis floridana aka palmetto bug) and others...

        https://www.google.com/search?q=german+cockroach

    2. Mpeler
      Coat

      Re: machine brought in in a garbage bag

      Those aren't bugs - those are features! (windoze 1 0, no doubt)...

      Yes, I'll take the one with RaidTM.

  5. Chris Miller

    I've told this story before (sorry)

    In the late 90s I was called to the computer room at our German call centre (located, like many German call centres, in former East Germany). The aircon was unable to maintain temperature and the servers (AS/400) were complaining. The room was just a standard office area that had been partitioned off and the doors carried Nicht Rauchen stickers.

    It didn't take long to spot the problem - the windows were wide open. I pointed out that this was preventing the aircon from working effectively. "Yes, but if we close them, it sets off the fire alarms when we smoke." A typical Ostie attitude toward dictats from central authority.

    1. Bill M

      Re: I've told this story before (sorry)

      Reminds me of another old AS400 story about the smash 'n grab burglary of a UK building society where a lorry was driven through its large front windows, driving over an AS400 that has been "securely" placed near the window. When the on-call techie arrived he noticed the tyre tracks over it but pushed it back the right way up, plugged the power cable back in and was relieved to see it boot up perfectly

      May or may not be an urban myth, but those AS400 were certainly heavily engineered.

      1. Roger Varley

        Re: I've told this story before (sorry)

        I could certainly believe it to be true. I used to reckon that the only way to stop one of those muthas would be to open one of the side panels and chuck a hand grenade inside, and I'm not entirely convinced that that would even kill it.

        I loved those machines.

        1. Bill M

          Re: I've told this story before (sorry)

          I once tried pick one up and was convinced it was bolted down until a couple of heavies were called to help.

      2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: I've told this story before (sorry)

        "May or may not be an urban myth, but those AS400 were certainly heavily engineered."

        Back in the day there was a story about DEC being asked for a copy of VMS. Given that the enquirer wasn't a customer they asked why. He said he'd found a MicroVAX in a skip.

        1. Mpeler
          Coat

          Re: I've told this story before (sorry)

          Was it just outside a building in Westboro? (Hardy Boys, MicroKids, and all)...

  6. Chris King

    Not just nicotine-tar dust bunnies...

    I was once called out to deal with a machine that had gone kaput. The prof in question was a chain-smoker, and his office had yellowed walls.

    I knew the machine was a goner before I even opened it. Beige tinge to the case and keyboard, and it was sitting on a layer of cigarette ash. Opening it up, I found that all the fans were totally gunked up and wouldn't move, so it looked like the CPU had cooked itself.

    "This is beyond economic repair. All I can do is transfer the data from the hard drive once your department replaces the machine".

  7. chivo243 Silver badge

    Laptop

    Intake duct, ashtray adjacent to it( a colleague was her friend and told us after the fact), chain smoker, the computer stank so bad we could smell it before she took it out of the bag.... nobody took the on the task, we told her it was a health hazard...

  8. AdamT

    ... not just PC's either. Once helped a friend gut a house he'd just bought (partly because of the hideous 60's décor and partly because the previous occupants were chain smokers). As we took down the lovely 60's polystyrene ceiling tiles you could crack them apart and see how far the yellow had soaked into the tile...

    1. chivo243 Silver badge

      I had a similiar experience, a friend bought a house, the people that lived there died there. They were really old, and chain smokers. He had the whole house re-plastered, and with in a few days, the nicotine was bleeding through the new plaster on the ceilings. YUCK!

      1. Pompous Git Silver badge

        and with in a few days, the nicotine was bleeding through the new plaster on the ceilings. YUCK!

        Your eyesight is truly amazing. Nicotine is a colourless liquid! A few days ago a friend claimed that he can see water vapour, and that's a colourless gas. Is it some new mutation among the young or something?

        1. x 7

          "Nicotine is a colourless liquid!"

          what s/he means is the toxic nicotine-containing tar which condenses on walls and ceilings. Toxic mainly because of the carcinogenic nitrosonicotines and nornicotines it also contains. As I've mentioned before, one of my previous employers used to make them for standards checking

    2. Hollerithevo

      Back to the brick

      We bought a flat from a couple who had moved into it in the 1950s and had both smoked steadily from that point. We tossed the curtains. We stripped the wallpaper. Then we took every scrap of plaster off walls and ceiling. We took up the carpets and lino and the wooden floors and started again. Oh, and also all the kitchen cabinets, bathroom cabinets, built-in wardrobes.

      Nasty.

  9. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. Hollerithevo

      Re: Smoking.

      No, it takes your life just when you'd really like it, i.e. in your 50s or 60s. The idea that you have a great middle age and early old age and then tidily keel over is a myth. You have steadily worsening health, perhaps chronic bad health, and then you have a wretched death.

  10. x 7

    I went to a house in Blackpool to fix a dead PC. Owner was a chain-smoking lazy sweaty stinking fat bastard who'd not picked up the empty beer cans and pizza boxes dotted around his house for at least six months. Claimed to be a game developer "so needed the PC urgently".

    Chain smoker. I got the side open, and it was completely full of ash. Not just a covering: it was completely full of ash, while all the surfaces were brown with nicotine tar residues. No spare space inside, it was a wonder the machine had not ignited.

    I screwed the side back on, told him "Its a health hazard. I'm not touching it until its been professionally decontaminated". He started mumbling and crying about his "games" and I was quite blunt: "you should have thought of that before, and backed up. IT'S NOT MY PROBLEM"

    I told the agency I was working for, and they blacklisted him. Working in his house, or on the machine was an environmental hazard: I would have needed a full COSHH assessment before starting!

    1. wolfetone Silver badge

      It really is a shame that Peter Molyneux has let himself go like that.

  11. EddieD

    Please don't remind me.

    I once had to go and fix the printer of a grand dame at the University. It was an old Oki laser printer that had an open toner cartridge - I always ended up with toner to the elbows.

    Worse that that though, was her computer. At that time smoking was still allowed in some offices, including hers, and she did. There was an ashtray on the base unit of the machine, below the right hand edge of the screen. The screen was yellowy-brown all the way up that bezel. The keyboard of the computer literally sucked at my fingers it was so damp with exhaled tar. Turing the keyboard upside down and tapping it (part of my standard service) produced a veritable avalanche of ash, crumbs and crud.

    Fortunately, shortly after there was a smoking ban in all offices.

  12. phuzz Silver badge

    My flatmate went through a World of Warcraft addiction while he was supposed to be a student.

    His computer sat on his desk, next to him, and every time he breathed out a lung full of smoke, it went straight into the intake fan on the front.

    After a year or so if this, his graphics card suddenly stopped working. Upon investigation, we found that the fan on it had become so gummed up with tar it had seized. Not content with just seizing however, it had somehow exploded, and the fan blades and hub were left dangling on the end of it's power cable, just below the heatsink.

    He still, has his computer on his desk and still smokes. It's only a matter of time before it happens again.

  13. psychonaut

    white dust

    i opened the side panel of a pc that was located in the floor of a customers bedroom. i was kneeling down and whipped the side panel off. my face was right next to the side panel.

    whoooof...a huge cloud of white dust enveloped my head

    uugh.

    i got on with the job. as i was about to leave, i spotted the culprit. a bottle of athletes foot powder. so the dust was all the foot powder that had come off her feet over the years and been sucked into the machine.

    suppresing my gag reflex, i made sure i got paid and got out of there

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: white dust

      "whoooof...a huge cloud of white dust enveloped my head...athletes foot powder...suppresing my gag reflex

      You do know that most of the dust in homes and offices is human skin flakes, don't you? Possibly full of mites.

  14. Xyra

    Been there...

    I had a very similar one in an office we relocated for a customer about 10 years ago.

    We removed the server that had been sitting in the corner of an office with 6 chain smokers and running for at least 3 years (it was there when we started supporting them, no idea how long before that).

    When we opened it up the whole of the bottom of the case up to the first hard disc bay (roughly 10") was full of stinky nicotine dust. Amazingly the server was still running flawlessly and never had an issue until we upgraded it with a new system a while later.

    I wish I had a photo of the mist it produced when it was hit with air dusters (After removing the bulk by hand)

  15. jason 7

    Smokers machines? Put them in the Shower!

    Seriously thats what I do for the really bad ones.

    Take out the CPU/HDD/DVD/Ram and BIOS battery. Make sure power is drained and just blast the thing through with hot water. Ten mins and it will gleam.

    I then put a industrial fan on it for an hour or so and then leave it for around 72 hours in a warm place.

    Pop all the bits back in and bingo. A fresh machine that works fine. Most smokers encrusted machines are quite old so its worth the risk IMO.

    1. Jeffrey Nonken

      Re: Smokers machines? Put them in the Shower!

      I've heard the dishwasher can be effective, too.

      For a faster drying time, rinse with alcohol after the water bath.

      1. Sandtitz Silver badge
        Joke

        Re: Smokers machines? Put them in the Shower!

        "For a faster drying time, rinse with alcohol after the water bath."

        Yeah, don't skimp with the alcohol and time sure does fly.

  16. TRT Silver badge

    Our central college IT department...

    bought a job lot of 2nd hand machines from a brokerage and deposited them around the college rather than allowing us to replace out suites with the iMacs that we wanted. We got the iMacs in the end, for reasons that will become apparent, when they had to remove the "unsuitable for use in a classroom of young adults aged 16-19" machines described below.

    Some 4 weeks before the start of the new term, 400 Dell GX1 (IIRC) arrived on our campus one morning. I arrived to find 200 had already been slung over our newly installed bench-top real estate. We were instructed by the IT director to make a standard build and then ghost it out (despite the fact that that never seemed to work with NT4 and the CAD software we had which was license keyed to the processor ID during installation).

    I let my PFY handle the standard machine build whilst I cabled up all 200 of our "new" suspiciously yellow looking machines.

    The PFY hands me a 3.5" external HDD with the image, and a pile of 3.5" floppies ready to boot up the new machines the next day. "You might want to get the director of IT over, actually. It was his idea to buy these bargain £150 each jobs."

    Puzzled, I made the arrangements.

    10am the next day, the IT director rolls up and congratulates us on being the first to have our deployment ready.

    "OK. Power up."

    PFY, myself and another two technicians went along the benches, inserting floppies and powering up the machines.

    *Whirrr..... hum..... buzz....* Every single one booted up perfectly and the multicast began.

    "What??? What's that smell?" the PFY primed.

    I sniffed the air and barely suppressed a giggle.

    "I... er... I don't know." said the IT director. "It seems a bit... smokey? But a bit... churchy? Reminds me of something. Herbal?"

    "Where did these machines come from?" I enquired casually, knowing full well that the labels on the bottom of each machine were written in Dutch and English and having put two and two together.

    "A brokerage company in Amsterdam. Apparently they came out of a chain of internet cafés or something. Only a year old, and less than half the price of new machines." He said innocently.

    "Well, we can definitely say that it was somewhere where smoking was allowed." I said, coughing lightly under the nasal onslaught.

    "Hm. It does have a kind of tobacco-like smell to it." He said. "It's quite strong, isn't it? I hope it wears off after running in for a bit."

    It didn't.

    "Anyway, this should take a while. No need to hang around. What time's lunch? No canteen in the summer? Is the crisp machine still working? No. What about the pub - open for lunches yet? Oh wow. That bird's trying to open the window from the outside. I wonder if Velma had the hots for Shaggy?"

    1. Darryl

      Re: Our central college IT department...

      Love it, but those GX1's were about as solid and reliable as a Sherman tank. I worked in a printing plant where the old GX1's were moved out to the plant floor for the press operators to use for email and electronic timesheets (yes, we had to block the internet, so that the porn downloads were minimized). The paper dust that comes off a high speed web press looks a little like fine show sometimes, and the old Dells sucked it in 24/7 for a couple years. Because it was so noisy, nobody noticed the squealing fans and assorted other noises they made.

      Shortly after I started, I decided to open them up and clean them. Popped the first cover off, and it was basically just a box of dust, with the top of the dust looking like a complete 3D mirror image of the inside of the case lid. Didn't bother with cans of air. Just grabbed an air hose and nozzle and went to town.

      Once I got down to the motherboard, I found the CPU fan was seized up completely, as was the power supply fan. CPU was pretty warm. Paper dust is one of those things that can spontaneously combust, so needless to say, this was a little dangerous.

      The amazing thing is, even though all twelve machines looked exactly the same inside, all of them were running happily. Despite that, I replaced a bunch of fans and started cleaning them out every six months

      1. TRT Silver badge

        Re: Our central college IT department...

        Ha! These machines *were* for the printing department - for use with the design courses and packaging prototyper. We only used sheet fed presses, but we did have a web system for demonstrating 2 colour rotogravure - noisy, smelly and dusty as f*** ( - can't recall who made that, though... Wasn't Winmüeller, was it? Hoffstader? I'm sure it was German.) Anyway, we managed to get 20 of the Dells cleaned up enough to use for the NT4 / ArtiosCAD classes, but the other 180 went off back to the central IT team and we got the Indigo iMacs that we had originally specified (though only 120 of them). I will admit, the GX1s were absolutely reliable and sturdy as a tank. They outlasted me anyway!

  17. The Quiet One

    I had to replace a laptop keyboard for someone at my work. They claimed keys were unresponsive, in fact they were sticking because of the think layer of tar underneath you could actually hear the keys squelching as you pressed them.

    Easily the most disgusting things I have had to deal with, a close second was the user who spilt a bottle of milk in their laptop and left it a couple of days before sheepishly reporting it. Removing what had become cottage cheese from a laptop is not my happiest memory.

  18. MarthaFarqhar

    I've had two memorable ones brought to me for diagnosis. First one was a laptop that mysteriously had stopped working. Checked the power supply, all well and good. Then moved onto the laptop,which had a bit of a funky smell to say the least, and when opened up could see there had been a bit of fluid spilt on it. Asked the user what happened, and she said, "I got up to make a cup of tea, and the cat lay on the keyboard, he does that because its warm on the laptop. He's a bit old, so...." and it was then we both realised her incontinent cat had peed on the keyboard, and this had seeped into the electronics and fried them.

    Second one was another member of staff who loaned a printer, and returned it stating it no longer worked. Found most of a pack of bourbon biscuits and a custard cream wedged in the print head, as well as various soft drinks that had been dumped into it. She claims her children were never let near it. She was asked to pay for a new printer.

    1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

      Found most of a pack of bourbon biscuits and a custard cream wedged in the print head, as well as various soft drinks that had been dumped into it. She claims her children were never let near it.

      I'll bet they were the sort of kids who fed matchbox cars through the flap on the VHS recorder "garage" as well. Amazing how many cars you can get in before one hits something essential. Like the spinning video heads...

      1. Stuart Halliday

        I had kids that used to feed their VCR toast....

    2. Stuart Halliday
      Angel

      Had a client who phoned me up to fix her desktop in her house.

      The tower was inside a wire cage. Soon found out why, there was a hedgehog, pigeon and 2 brown rats living with her freely in the room.

      Every port of the PC was full of sawdust. USB, serial, parallel, you name it.

      Not wanting to take the PC back to base, I opened it on her kitchen table and it exploded with more sawdust!

      I was coughing and scratching for a week afterwards!

  19. Sir Barry
    Pint

    Bless my sister

    Nothing to do with smoking, but many years ago my sisters PC was playing up so I took a look. I ran some diagnostic software and then rebooted telling her what I was doing. I can't remember what I did next, but had to wait a while so I flipped her keyboard upside down and started shaking the debris out.

    She asked me if I was rebooting the PC.

    Took her a few years to live that one down.

    Beer 'coz it's sort of Friday

    1. TRT Silver badge

      Re: Bless my sister

      The Etch-a-Sketch method of resetting the system. Aka the physical analog of CLS.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Nothing to do with smoking...

    I once worked for a company which had a designer, and he had a rather large expensive computer for design purposes. Then it stopped working.

    When I went to investigate I discovered that his office had been entirely remodelled. He had built himself a huge desk, shelves and a cupboard out of MDF, and it was all fitted. I took the computer away...

    When I opened the case it was completely full of MDF particles that had eventually blocked both the cpu fan and the main fan, and filled the power supply.

    It turned out that he had cut all the MDF himself using a circular saw and a jigsaw, and had done it in his office with the computer running. He had then sent in the cleaner to remove all the dust.

    It was apparently the fault of IT that computers suck in dust; obviously a design fault, as was the keyboard that now no longer worked because half the keys wouldn't press.

    But at least he got a new computer out of it.

    This was the same guy that thought it would be clever to use lots of punctuation signs in file names until a whole lot of files disappeared and Norton Commander had to be used to recover them.

  21. Doctor_Wibble
    Facepalm

    It wasn't a filter...

    A while back I started wondering why my laptop never seemed to let its fan go idle any more - opened it up, cleared some (hardly any) fluff didn't see anything wrong, suspected some weird chipset or power fault somewhere.

    It wasn't until after it shut itself down with an emergency hardware-protection warning what with the internal temperature being 99C that I took a closer look and realised that what I had thought was a fibre-mat filter was nothing of the sort and was really just laminated fluff clogging the vent. Double embarrassment that it was the exhaust vent so I should have been suspicious the first time instead of ignoring it on the basis that it looked like it was supposed to be there - of course a buildup like that would just neatly fit because of the way it forms and is heat-welded into place...

  22. defiler

    In my youth...

    We had a PC brought into the shop which stank of chain-smoker. I had the joy of cracking the lid off it, to be faced with a carpet within.

    The insides had a mat about 0.75" thick covering the whole thing, where the cigarette tar had stuck dust to the components, and then dust to dust until it had filled out into a rug.

    I think the machine was still working - he'd wanted a RAM upgrade or something. He was told that we couldn't deal with the computer because it hadn't been bought from us (PC World, for my shame), and that it had been accepted for upgrade mistakenly.

    To this day the worst I've seen...

  23. Sequin

    A neighbour once asked me to take a look at her laptop which was shutting down unexpectedly. A test showed that when it shut down it was literally too hot to put on your lap, and the system was protecting itself by pulling the plug.

    A quick dismantle showed that the holes in the mesh covering the air intake were down to about 20% of their original size, with the rest being blocked by tar and nicotine deposits. Two minutes with a stiff paintbrush cured the problem.

  24. Sequin

    You think tobacco is bad?

    I used to work for a large government department in a tower block in northern England. The building, while under construction, had been involved in one of the longest running industrial disputes in British history. The shell of the building had been put up, and ventilation ducts installed, but no windows, doors or anything else had been fitted before the building unions walked out and picketed the site for nearly five years!

    In the meantime, the local feral cat population found themselves a new home and multiplied their numbers as cats do. When the dispute finished, the construction company found it too difficult to clear them out so pumped the building full of poison gas and later removed what corpses they could find. Of course many were left in that darker recesses of the ductwork and these mummified and eventually started to crumble.

    We used to come in every day to find a layer of greyish dust over our desks, and the PC's needed regular de-catting.

    1. I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects

      Re: You think tobacco is bad?

      > and the PC's needed regular de-catting.

      No unions or decent management I suppose. But a phone call to health and safety at work would have produced an excuse for dole.

  25. TonyBanjo

    Camouflage

    Hanging around a friend's computer shop a teenager came in with his games rig which had stopped working. He had spray painted the whole system unit with a camouflage theme, front and back panels clogging up drive slots, fans, ports etc.

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    My tale of an adulterated machine is going to sound a bit tame, as it was when my partner managed to spill nothing more sinister than tea on her laptop keyboard. Except the tea was some herbal nonsense flavoured with lemon juice and sweetened with copious amounts of honey. The tea proceeded to eat away at various materials, while the honey defied any attempts to clean it off. Result was a laptop that slowly died over the next day or so of use as the keyboard gummed up and the electronics were subjected to citric acid.

    1. Bronek Kozicki

      that's exactly why I keep a bottle of isopropyl alcohol at home. This miraculous fluid even saved my Westone earphones after the wash :)

  27. jcitron

    Gross can be an understatement.

    Over the years I've run into more than my fair share of gross PCs and peripherals. Though not all smoking related, this one in particular stands out. In my early hardware tech days, I used to repair video terminals for a long gone manufacturer, and had the honors of repairing the much older Ontel terminals and their peripherals.

    One day I got a box of keyboards in for repair from one customer. There were various tags on the keyboards saying "broken", "don't work", etc., all without a description of the exact problem, which can be very "helpful" for repairs!

    Most were pretty easy fixes, like replacing the keyboard controller, fixing the cable because a wire broke, or replacing a grain of wheat bulb for the caps lock or other function keys. One particular keyboard commanded a bit more attention. The keys were stuck, or didn't move well. Upon inspection internally, it was filled with some kind of yellowish goopy stuff. Yup. Someone had spilled what appeared to be Lipton's Noodle Soup into the keyboard, which had crapped up the keyboard completely!

    Being huge, heavy, well made keyboards that can come apart, I was able to wash the parts. I took the keycaps off and hand cleaned those. The switches were dumped in the trash and replaced with new ones, and the board was sent down to manufacturing to go through the board washer. After reassembly, the keyboard was like new and worked perfectly.

    If this was a normal keyboard, it would have been DMR'd and sent to the bin, however, these were proprietary systems with custom keyboards for each customer. In the end I was quite pleased I could get that one up and running again.

  28. Neil Barnes Silver badge

    I'm sure we've all opened the box and found bits missing...

    To get to Tajikistan in the nineties, you had to fly to Tashkent, then get a taxi across the border to Khojand at dark o'clock, then fly from Khojand to Dushanbe where the office was (unless, as it happened, the plane didn't fly for complicated reasons and you had to get a taxi for two hundred miles across the mountains... but I digress).

    Arriving at Dushanbe, one waits and waits and eventually the freight comes in via Moscow. Built the radio studio, no problems, but then we installed the computers. These were some of the first general purpose audio editing machines, running 486s at something like 25MHz - real state of the art at the time.

    Pushed the power button. Nothing... investigated a bit closed and discovered that some miscreant along the way had chosen to remove the covers, the processors, the memory, the discs...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I'm sure we've all opened the box and found bits missing...

      My experience has been that Russian aircraft don't work for the simplest of reasons - no maintenenece or work by drunk air crew. Lots of places I was based in used Russian helicopters and we always felt we were taking our lives in our hands. Best were the 'demilitarised' Hinds.

      1. Fibbles

        Re: I'm sure we've all opened the box and found bits missing...

        Can't really blame the aircraft for what the meatbags do to them. IMO, if after having been serviced by a drunk* an aircraft can still become airborne most of the time, then the engineering has to be pretty damn good.

        *fnarr fnarr...

  29. Velv
    Boffin

    Back in the days when you could smoke on aircraft the maintenance crews found the yellow staining a great indicator for finding the leaks in the pressure vessel.

  30. David Neil

    Sausage skins

    Did a gig as on site support dogsbody at a place which made turn cowskins into collagen casings for sausages etc.

    Line operation PC's on the shopfloor needed refurbed, some memory upgrades and reimaging was the plan.

    Got the first one back to the bench and on opening it was like something from Aliens, covered in a thin film of collagen inside...

  31. jcitron

    That poor HP laptop!

    Granted this was one of those inexpensive machines, probably $350 at the most at Walmart or a similar store, however, there is no reason to abuse the hardware the way this lady did.

    A family friend brought over her laptop for me to take a look at because it "didn't work" as she said and it had pop-ups. Okay, I'll be nice I said and see what's up with the machine. She brought the machine over in a plastic bag and left because she had some errands to do. I could smell the machine before I opened up the bag due to her being a chain-smoker.

    Before I powered up the machine, I gave it a once over which turned into a more than once over with cleaners after I dawned a pair of Latex gloves. In addition to the yellow slime, which took many washes to remove, I blew out the ashes with the air compressor, which I took outside because I didn't want the ashes in my house.

    It was during this time, I noticed that she had dropped a butt on the laptop and melted the case near the keyboard along with the wireless mouse dongle. She didn't even notice this?!

    I finally got to the crux of the problem and found that the machine, in addition to being dirty outside, had about 4800 malware things, and come to find out she never let Windows do any updates because "They take too long and I don't want to wait for them." she told me. Needless to say, she didn't get the machine back as quickly as she thought and had to come back the next day for it.

    Now it's hard to believe this machine still worked, albeit quite slowly. After I cleaned it up it wasn't so bad except for that distinct odor of tar and that horrible scar on the inside. There's no excuse to treat the machine like this even if it's one of those cheap laptops.

  32. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Revently I've been wondering if e-cigs are bad for computers too. Probably can't be as bad smoking, but even if it's just "water vapor" as proponents say, that's still not something you really want to put in a computer. I had a power supply blow pretty spectacularly after someone had been vaping near the computer for a few months, but it was also under unusually heavy load and the computer was getting on in years, so I don't know if it's fair to attribute it the to the vapor or not.

  33. jsp91470

    Death by nicotine

    We had an employee who worked remotely from home with a company-issued computer and printer, which meant he was exempt from the smoking-in-the-office regulations. He was a chain smoker, and when he retired he shipped his PC and printer back to us. The inside was completely yellow with nicotine that made my fingers go numb. Disgusting. I just trashed both of them rather than deal with them.

    Fortunately that's the only time I've had to deal with that, since smoking was banned in offices well before I entered the business world.

    Even more of a killer than nicotine, however, is that Happy Birthday glitter stuff. People at the office thought it would be a great idea to give the birthday boy's (or girl's) cube a liberal dusting of glitter-- sometimes shaped into tiny letters spelling out "Happy Birthday" and other times just the microscopic glitter that my kids used to use in school art projects. That stuff would mess up a keyboard almost immediately, and it invariably got sucked into the PC's fans, to the point where management had to ban it.

  34. kain preacher

    The worst for me was repairing people's laptops that used them as snack trays.

  35. Captain DaFt

    A different kind of dirty

    Back about 2004, I was browsing in a thrift store when I came across an old PII. Actually, it was setting near the front of the store under one of the AC vents. (Foreshadowing!)

    They were only asking $10, so I figured if it worked, I'd put Wary Pup on it and use it as a web browsing machine, if not, it was a good case for building a computer in.

    Got it home, opened it up, and... It. was. pristine!

    I've never seen a cleaner computer, it looked like it had been put together that day. But... the smell. It reeked like it had been soaking in rancid petrol for years! The aroma was headache inducing. Took a week of setting on the back deck to air out properly!

    Once it passed the smell test, brought it back in, attached a spare monitor, keyboard and mouse, plugged it in and fired it up. Took nearly two hours to boot up!

    Windows 98SE, no virus protection, and, if I recall correctly, IE 5.5, and no telling how many viruses.

    A quick look at the file specs showed it had run from 1999 to 2001, which meant it had probably been setting in a shed next to the petrol can for three years to account for the smell.

    Immediate reformat of hard drive, then again, just because.

    Rebooted to bios, set it to load from CD, installed Wary, surfed the web with it until around 2007, when it finally gave up the ghost.

  36. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Roadside emergency telephone system

    The whole long distance road network in this major middle-eastern nation, about the size of Europe, had been fitted with Philips/Ericsson roadside emergency phones. Press Alarm button, then speak clearly "Help, my Isuzu hatchback has hit a goat/camel - please send help" was the idea, but it didn't quite work like that.

    A typical day at the office was to drive 500 km to "Al Kharj" (where the night before a minor Royal had for example bumped his car, pressed the button, and been unimpressed) test the roadside module, which invariably worked in and of itself, but strangely its network seemed down. Next in the fault-finding procedure was to find the local emergency response centre, knock politely on the door, wait ten minutes, hammer on the door (politely due the AK47s) and try an wake up the cops, it being mid-day after all. Eventually, someone would emerge to see what all the fuss was about, mint tea would be brewed, other members of the force would wake and join in the party. A long period of friendly respectful banter would ensue, tactfully questioning gently, whether, maybe, someone had seen the emergency telephone control desk recently? It was agreed that it often made a terrible noise, really disturbed the serious police-life, and was a devilish invention. We did eventually persuade them to find it, plug it in again, we removed the crud (animal, vegetable, mineral & smoking residues) from within & without, dusted, changed the blown bulbs, repaired the cable input. Plugged into the mains. And left our new mates to rest after a very stressful day with infidels.

    The next day it would be 500km in the other direction, similar job. Nice country, mostly nice people. Technology wise it seemed a bit like giving a PDP11 to Sir Walter Rayleigh. This was all a very long time ago, but didn't one of their foreign ministers allegedly tweet last month that he'd managed to buy an Oppenheimer device from a neighbor. . .hopefully he was joking?

  37. x 7

    one bastard called Bob who worked for me at Time Computers left three dead crabs in his work computer when he left. Took us weeks to realise that it wasn't the air conditioning that was the problem....

    1. hplasm
      Happy

      Time Computers-

      -near Blackburn?

      If so you should put their comms room up for El Reg cabling madness (can't remember the exact thread) if you can get any old pictures. More of a deathtrap than a gungy PC, it was Impossible to enter and leave without at least one cable coming loose and tripping up the unwary visitor, and woe betide any attempts at putting the plug back in wherever it came from... only Indiana Jones could traverse the web of tripwires!

      1. x 7

        Re: Time Computers-

        that comms room was a fucking deathtrap......couldn't hear the firebells from in there. Once during an alarm I had to kick the door down to break the lock so I could tell the networks team to get out......the joys of being a fire marshal. The fools inside had totally ignored us doing a high-speed evac of the call-centre

        I've no photos unfortunately. Actually I'd forgotten how bad it was until you reminded me....but now you have, I shudder at the memory

  38. Bakana

    Lizard

    A personal favorite.

    Went into the local computer store one afternoon and found the owner displaying the Problem he'd just fixed for a customer.

    Floppy Disks would not Load into the drive.

    When opened up, the problem turned out to be a small Lizard that had apparently crawled in for the warmth and was Crushed by subsequent attempts to insert a diskette.

    He placed it in a plastic bag and thumbtacked it to the store's cork board along with a photo showing where it was found. It was on display for a week or so. Then his wife removed the plastic bag into the trash can.

  39. Marty McFly Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Did that, done that....

    Many years ago in a career far far away, I was responsible for upgrading late 80's / early 90's PCs for Y2K. The catch is, these were PCs which ran a (cool for its time) DOS based Point-of-sale system. Okay, so they weren't coated in nicotine, they were coated in restaurant grease and all the nasties that come with it.

    Solution... strip everything from the case that had wires attached to it. Take the case down to the office dishwasher (seriously, who ever uses the dishwasher in the break room). Run it through, and it came out like new. Install the new hardware, and there is your upgraded POS system!

  40. Stuart Halliday

    Customer phones up to complain that his expensive custom software isn't working. After extensive telephone support we couldn't fix it. So we arrange a courier to pick up the computer and return it within 24 hours.

    We get the PC and fix the problem. Young engineers being, well young, go foraging in his harddrive.

    They come across 100GB of photographs. Well we think they were Pornographic as we couldn't see individual images as they were protected by encryption. But the twat had used long filenames to describe in detail each image!

    Most were of dubious material shall we say?

  41. Stuart Halliday

    Once opened a VCR (Video Cassette Recorder for those people too young to remember video cassettes) and was amazed to see a gold plated video drum.

    Thinking naively to myself that the machine must be very good quality, I cleaned the drum with iso-p and it all came off in the brush. Yes, nicotine goes everywhere when you smoke.

    VCR played much better too.

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