News: 1614327305

I used to be a "technician" at a fruity based company....

We often had iMacs come in where the screen was "working mens club" yellow..... With customers complaining. Thing is, the iMacs have 3 substantial fans: Power supply, HDD and Logic board. These things suck from the bottom of the imac and chuck it out of the slot across the top.

If you've an ash tray sat right beneath the imac, then......

Even one that had had lager spilt into it smelt better.

One possibly worse....way back when I was at college a fellow student got a maintenance job at the local amusement park, sorting out all the arcade machines. It was when the "sit inside" machines like Star Wars and the tank battle one were popular. However the manufacturers chose under the seat as a good place to put some of the mainboards, which is fine until a Very Young Person decides to sit in there, play around with the controls and have a "little accident".

Seems urine is very good at attacking solder, so not only was there a bad smell but the board was trashed..

Coke is another effective way of destroying motherboards. Had a nearly new laptop trashed because the user was careless enough to spill coke in it and stupid enough to not admit it until it was too late. The keyboard, mother board and screen all got a good dose so it was beyond economic repair.

The one that had soup in it* we managed to recover except for a new screen!

*User put laptop and container of soup in the same bag, recipe for disaster from the start.

Yep anything fizzy or fruity was death to electronics. If someone said they'd spilt coke, irn bru (possibly better than coke at dissolving electronics) or fruit juice normally we'd just say it was dead and not to bother. If it ever started working again it was always temporary, the sugar and acid would kill it soon enough.

Remember helping someone explain that "OK, you have spilled coffee on your keyboard - do you take sugar" was not a wind-up. Black coffee was not so bad, with sugar and cream...

I will claim the 5th Amendment over a cup of coffee that landed inside a CRT monitor. Good job it didn't have sugar in so after drying out overnight it worked perfectly.

Back in the day, at my first 'proper' job (as in it was a job that I actually wanted to do, not merely a way of paying the bills), we used VT220s - but I don't remember anyone smoking in the office. Smoking at home? That was another matter - and my ashtray sat right in front of my Compaq Deskpro (sporting 4.77MHz of pure 8086 muscle). Most of the front of the Deskpro was black plastic, and the beige of the case was a kind of tar stained beige anyway - so the effect of my habit was not all that noticeable on the hardware of my computer. But…

One day I needed to upgrade it - and the inside of the case and the motherboard were beginning to get brown and tacky with tar. The thought occurred to me that if that was what my computer was like on the inside, what kind of state must I now be in? A worrying thought. So began the first of a few false starts on the road to giving up, and turning the addictive side of my personality to something more constructive - Triathlon and Marathon in my case. I don't think that the damage that I did all those years ago will ever be entirely undone though.

I used to pretty much chain smoke when deep diving into problems harder than diamond and my massive (at the time) Hitachi monitor used to take a bit of a pounding. I was desperately trying to speed up some 3d modelling code one night and knocked over my 18 year old scotch from the SMWS that had enough peat in it to grow spuds. A drop of it hit the screen which I'd recently gone over with a commercial screen wipe and, to my surprise, left a really clean spot.I quickly retrieved the wipe and soaked up the remains of the scotch (that I hadn't managed to suck off the desk) and cleaned the screen with it. It was far better than the wipe on its own and I put it in a sealed container and used it several times. Not only did it provide superior cleaning it tended to send me to the whisky cabinet which I liked to think helped solve coding problems.

Only experienced a couple myself, but ask any TV repairman about CRT TVs from a smokers house.

You pretty much had to chisel the tar off - very carefully of course!

Those concerned with the detrimental effect of environmental contaminants should try running a computer in a cement plant raw meal production unit ( basically a system for creating dust) I recall Philips ( yes they did make computers in the 70's) taking one mainboard away for their black museum which, although still working, was so coated in raw meal that there were no recognisable components on the board. In another instance, we operated a PDP11/23 in another laboratory that, despite it being in a cabinet with filtered air and being stripped down and completely "cleaned" prior to the arrival of the DEC engineer for it's routine service eventually lost Service support. Suprisingly, the only main issues we ever had were excessive wear on the surface of the floppies.

Not as bad as PCs in crematorium that get full of dust. As you know what that dust is

Not least of working for a Televideo distributor in the '80s. One of their "terminals" was actually a PC, with an all-in-one motherboard in the bottom of the stand, which talked to the Televideo Novell Netware servers via RS-422 fast serial links. Quite advanced for the day.

Anyway, one of our customers was a company that maintained London black cabs, in an underground workshop somewhere on the outskirts of central London, I forget where exactly. They had something like 20 bays, and a constant stream of cabs coming and going.

I went up there one day to change out the BIOS ROM chips on their half-dozen PC. The outsides of the systems were reasonably clean, by the standards of other workshop PCs I have known. But, oh my, the state of the motherboards...

GJC

... is a dramatic drop-off in the number of tar filled, overheating laptops you have to try and fix!

You can still get problems though, is they've converted to ecigs, although it is rarer.

The more cloudy devices use a high vegetable glycerine mix (glycerol) which pulls moisture out of the air, then settles.

Or gets pulled into the computers PSU intake. And then pops it.

Not an urban legend; when I used to use cloudy vapes a lot, I killed my own PSU doing this. Protip if you vape like a fiend - dont have your computer in the way of your exhaled clouds :-)

But yeah, smokers pcs, even as a 40 a day roll up smoker, were foul, and a good incentive to stop, as another has commented here...

Steven R

Ah, the days of upgrading the office computers. Carefully remove the case (carefully because they were really cheap and the unground metal edges would rip your hand open). Admire the bright yellow fluff gathered around the board. Remove. Smile at the rivulets of dried tar on the inside of the case. Wipe clean. Note how sticky the motherboard was. Shrug. Insert new modem/memory/graphics card/whatever. Carefully close case. If careless, wipe new bloodstains off case and get a plaster. Repeat 12 times.

I did a repair job once on a machines that was constantly overheating and shutting down,

When I opened the case which was a mini tower under a desk, the case was half filled with cigarette ash covering the cpu and fan.

The smell was overpowering and disgusting and I've never really forgotten it.

The owner was in the habit of tapping his ciggie at the front fan grill, the ash was convieniently drawn into the case making the whole thing a 5Kg ashtray that hadn't been emptied for 4yr.

In my first 'proper' job, my boss smoked cigarettes, and typed with the offending object between index and middle finger. His keyboard was covered in crud, and most of the lesser used character keys were unreadable. Fortunately I never had to use his terminal.

In my third employment, after a rearrangement of the offices, I 'inherited' a keyboard and PC from the Director who smoked. The keyboard was filthy, so I spent a while cleaning it, until I was prepared to type on it without wearing rubber gloves. A little while later I was moved to a new desk for some work, with another crud-encrusted keyboard, which I dutifully cleaned. At the next move I realised what was going on and just cleaned all of the keyboards one day. I never had to move desk again. (I mean, for goodness' sake, they could have just ASKED me to clean the keyboards, you know, I was only a senior consultant, it was not like any of the junior consultants could possibly have wielded the spray can and cloth, or, heaven forfend either of the directors.)

When I was a student we went to a pub which had a beer garden and a posh sign for it on the door which was made from that soft-plastic that sticks to glass without adhesive. It was about 5 foot high and one of my housemates decided it would look good on the patio doors of the house. He managed to nick it, took it home and stuck it on the doors, thereby creating our own beer garden.

It stank. It really stank of stale fags and stale beer - but mostly fags. Even though one the guys smoked, the smell of this sign was horrendous and overpowering to the extent that it was no longer possible to tell if it was spag bol or corned beef hash for tea just by the smells wafting from the kitchen. It was a nice shade of brown, although I guess it started out clear, and we had to take it down after a couple of days. He smuggled it back into the pub and it re-appeared on the door after a couple of days.

When I moved, I stayed at a mates house, whilst I was looking for a flat.

He shared the house with another friend, who didn't pay rent on the understanding he would keep the house clean... Only he didn't.

My mate was a chain smoker and had his own business working out of a converted bedroom - air con, 4 servers, 3 desktops a laptop and a couple of printers. All in nicotine orange!

My mate went away for a weekend with his then girlfriend. My girlfriend came to visit and we sat in his stinking office. We couldn't take it any longer. We cleaned the kitchen, to start with, and the black stair rail - it was white! And the office. I sprayed Breff Power at the top of the door, where it was pink, by the time it had run down to the middle of the door, it was dark orange and by the time it hit the floor, it was black! We cleaned everything, although we made the mistake of opening the fridge in the office, it was turned off, but still had old food in it! By the time we were finished, everything sparkled, well, almost everything. I left one printer uncleaned, except for a white stripe along the middle of the top of the printer.

Reminds of when my Mum called the TV engineer out............