...as was having to "repair" keyboards that were full of fag ash. There was always something under the centre of the spacebar that looked exactly like earwax too. If anyone knows what it really was, please enlighten me!

Yes its what happens when there are successive non-catastrophic coffee spillages.

I say coffee, I mean milky Nescafe with sugar, but as you know, it passed for coffee back then.

As a Spanish colleague of mine once put it, "Nescafé" is a contraction of "No es café" (literally, it's not coffee). No arguing there.

I've also had to open computers used by chain smokers... When my previous employer went smoke free, I stopped working on filth filled machines. The worst one was a Dell laptop and the user in question put his ash tray next to the intake vent for the fan... It came to the office in a plastic bag, and we all could smell it as soon as it came in the door! Even the one smoker in the office was offended! We did not open even open the bag, wrote it off as a total loss.

We once picked up a keyboard that had been the victim of Ribena. Even two days in an ultrasonic bath full of acetone failed to clean it. We gave up at that point!

@bofh1961

Why would you try to wash off a water soluble substance (you knew it was Ribena) using acetone and an ultrasonic bath?

acetone and an ultrasonic bath

Yes, I would have expected that to melt the keyboard.

The Mrs once managed to get cough mixture into the keyboard of an earlier generation Apple clamshell laptop keyboard. We didn't notice much till the liquid began to harden... Managed to remove the affected keys, scrape the stuff off with a toothpick and got it back to nearly good as new.

"cough mixture into the keyboard"

I hope that was before consumption.

Small child, primary school as the teacher (Icon) put it on the ticket "Child lost his lunch on the keyboard".

I was sent to drop off the replacement (Early finish on my way home).

We kept the old one for you to take back with you if you want it!

I decided that the nornal WEEE compliance could take a running jump & said they can throw it in with their own rubbish.

Not an IT thing, but I was called to fix a mysterious series of faults on a sound desk in a studio; odd things like the tape machines would start and stop randomly.

Eventually traced it to corroded tracks on the sound desk motherboard, and that was because some kind soul had spilt mineral water into it some months previously. It had dried up, but left its salts behind, and whenever the weather got a bit humid, it corroded a little further...

Once at school my prized commodore scientific calculator suffered from a spillage of a concentrated glucouse solution in a biology lesson ...2 or 3 of the keys subsequently were always sticky - literally and also could stick down when pressed .. fortunately this was still in the days were compasses with sharp pointy ends were still allowed and could be used to pull the key back up when necessary. Also, just like a HHGTTG towel, that corner of the calculator could be licked to get a quick sugar boost!

The username checks out :)

Wow. Spark one up mate.

You should switch to cannabis mate. Just as dangerous but less bitter.

I used to smoke heavily and when monitors were CRT the static attracted the smoke to the screen - my 21" Hitachi monitor I have for many years protected the towers under the desk and was cleaning it nearly induced me to give up!

Modern monitors dont have the pulling power - generally not electrically active with the air but as I no longer smoke I can assure you you can smell a smokers machine, often before it enters the room.

As for tax most of the people round here who still smoke seem to survive on smuggled fags and tobacco though where it comes from I have no idea.

Now go and get real and go on bended knees, then thank all the smokers, because we are taxed to the end of the planet and back. Just think how much extra tax you would have to pay if we stopped.

Of course you should earn less. You cost the health service a boatload extra in care that would not be needed if you gave up this asocial habit (or did you really think that cancer treatments are cheap - yes, DO look at the numbers), and you spend far fewer hours working due to fag breaks where no equivalent is offered to non-addicts.

In addition, you pollute the environment with your fag ends and foul the air for others - try getting into ANY kind of public transport without having to fight your way through the smog emitted by addicts. And don't get me started on the coughing - you brought all of that on yourself. Most of you lot also don't have the courtesy to exhale a few times before you then enter non-smoing areas, carrying the stench not only in your clothes but also in your breath and there isn't a deo and breath mint in the world which can disguise the carcinogenic nature of it. Once upon a time it was a social habit, now it's as anti-social as you can get.

I buried a few of your kind. None of them had an easy end, trust me.

For a brief while, my father ran a cleaning service. He called in the whole family to clean the walls of one apartment that had been occupied by a chain smoker for 15 years. The white walls had been turned yellow by tar. We had nothing that could dent the tar without also stripping the paint, which was outside our remit. The owner ended up repainting.

If you can put a tenacious layer of cigarette' tar on walls then it seems reasonable that an office of chain smokers could cover other surfaces.

My 6 year old monitor works fine

I didn't realize they made CRTs for computers 6 years ago, I thought everyone went LCD by then. Personally, I have no trouble believing that the static on a CRT screen could attract an extra helping of tar and ash. They were always dust magnets.

The owner of the house where I live smokes in the garage only, not the house.

There's a brown tar stain on the door edges where it meets the door frame.

Years ago my parents bought a car second hand where the previous owner was a smoker ... slight lingering tobacco smell which went away reasonably quickly but the was a brown stain on the ceiling just above where a driver's left hand holds the steerin wheel that remained!

You go ahead, matey. You won't be collecting your pension for very long, and there'll be more for the rest of us.

What part of his posting do you think is incorrect?

You are obviously delusional. Your taxes for smoking do not pay for all the secondhand smoking caused patient care. I have never smoked a day in my life, my father smoked like a freight train labouring under a heavy load, thus I am saddled with asthma-like respiratory symptoms for the rest of my life.

You would have to pay a few thousand dollars *per pack* to pay for the medical needs of all those your smoke hurts.

@idiot taxpayer here again

Happy New Year!

I watched my grandfather with an oxygen bottle near his bed, he was dying a slow and horrifying death

... Years before that he made me promise never to smoke cigs. Then he got out a piece of paper which had some figures on it. It was the total (based on average weekly bill) he and my grandmother had smoked in their lives. He told me that money could have bought 3 of 1970's Cadillacs. Now, instead he has poor heath, had 3 heart attacks by that time, he was 62 at that time, I'll be there in a few years, and thank him every day for making promise him I would never smoke cigs.

Disclaimer: my wife is many years younger than I am, and IS a smoker, I see the decline every day, I wonder who will go first?

Also, the computer in question came in a plastic shopping bag with one strip of celo tape, not in an FBI evidence bag... me thinks you assume too much...

My father lost half a lung to smoking, I was about 9 years old at the time.

That & a World In Action program showing smokers lungs around the same time made for a pretty good incentive not to take it up.

Apparently my mother smoked a little when she met my father around 1960 ... he was a doctor and put together a collection of photos of smokers lungs to show her - she stopped smoking immediately.

Spillages, I've seen a few!

One was a desktop with a failed PSU, a not uncommon problem but, nothing to do with the spillage. No the spillage problem was the full sugar coke that had been left under the machine to dry and glued it to the desk! Both desk and computer bore the scars of that incident.

Another was a desktop that failed because of a spillage. The call said something had gone wrong with the electrickery bits and the magic smoke escaped. Cue yours truly to examine diagnose and fix said box. The number one suspect was a paper cup someone had stood on the system box and forgot about, which then leaked a mysterious liquid.

The mystery liquid was a patients urine.

The hows whys and wherefores of the cup/urine combination were never explained to me. But the various tests and jabs after were truly memorable and served as a reminder to use liquid resistant PPE for ward visits.

Replacing PC's at NRES in Plymouth, lifted one PC to discover a coffee spillage underneath it.

The spillage had acted as primordial soup, life had evolved, gained sentience & had got to a Futurama style "Godfellows"(Icon) point & had a war with their neighbour's & all that was left was the dusty ancient ruins of their civilisation.

It wasn't cleaning up at all, so I positioned the new smaller machine right over it.

When I still smoked by the computer at home, before the days of non-smoking apartments, my monitor and keyboard would get downright tacky with deposited nicotine and tar. But as I tended to lean back and *then* reach for my smoke, my keyboards didn't suffer from "ashitis." :)

I worked for a company that installed and maintained ATMs up and down the country. On several occasions we got a call from a bank to clean out the ATM that was next to a pub because it was full of vomit.

I thank God that I wasn't trained on that kit!

I had the unfortunate experience of withdrawing some cash late after pub chucking out so I could hit the kebab van only to discover on the way to the kebab van someone had deposited chilli sauce on the ATM and I had the unusual experience of standing ordering a kebab while my eyes streamed and screamed before I'd even got the bloody thing!

Years ago in Bristol the then Midland Bank had some ATM machines in the city center where you had to first swipe your card to open a door to get into a "room" that held the machines. Someone I vaguely knew worked a the Midland branch next to these machine. He said it was part of the Monday morning routine to gather round a montor while someone checked the friday/staurday night CCTV videos as turned out a surprising number of drunken couples thought that by going through the outer door meant they had found somewhere "private"

Lots of stories of this type but the one that always springs to mind is the waste disposal company with OKI Microline 132 col dot matrix printers thundering away outputting the invoices inside huge cabinets/acoustic hoods. Same as the story above, you needed breathing aparatus to go into the portacabin and I hated going there because I always ended up with mud on my suit trousers wading across the site.

Called out one day, "not printing anything". Printer was too hot to touch inside its cabinet because the fans on both sides of the cabinet had gummed up with the tar completely suffocating the poor Oki.

Not my problem I said, we only cover the printer, not the acoustic cabinet. You'll have to run it with the lid up until you get a new one.

Those old OKIs were pretty much indestructible. On place where I worked had them by the dozen. Weakest parts were the user buttons and the PSU. You could make a working one from two failures inside 5 minutes.

One had a peculiar fault. It would run for about 15 seconds, with the print head slowing down all the time. Power cycle and the same 15 second performance.

I cleaned the guide rod, hoping to shift some (invisible) sticky stuff off it. Now 20 seconds before the head stalled!

The normally-cylindrical head guide had worn after many many thousands of pages. As it skewed on that guide rod, the effect was of a brake.

A smear of WD40 and performance was back to normal. I returned it to its place in the Stores, and the storeman thereafter applied his own fix.

OKI's "replacement" for those was abysmal. Many failed well before the warranty expired.

I was called out to one where the fault was "it's printing backwards"

Factory made magnets and the entire pcb was covered in a layer of magnetic dust so thick that you could barely see the ICs. Went over to the compressor/airline in the corner, blew the dust off it and it worked perfectly.

Health and Safety, inhalation of dust etc, nobody gave a damn back then.

But yes they were bombproof. I saw some still going strong at manchester airport a couple of weeks ago

I would like to think that had I been in "John's" place, I would have after realising what the Problem was, cleaned a portion of the screen, then taken the monitor back with a pack of wipes, and an admonishen that "This was not an IT issue but a Healthy and Safety Issue, and they should either take care of it themselves, or invite the H&S bods to come and take care of it...".

Then again, if I was just an apprentice at the time like John supposedly was, I might have delegated the taking it back to the Boss and let him have that discussion with the Beancounters. Actually, fixing the issue in the way John and his Boss did, just means that all of the monitors would eventually arrive back in such a condition. Making them aware of the issue would mean they would hopefully take care of it themselves...

I once cleaned HALF of a screen - just to demonstrate to the idiots what the problem was!

The first PC I ever owned was an IBM AT. It had a CGA monitor, 20 mb had disc and a keyboard that would have stopped a bullet!

The actual computer bit was seriously heavy (possibly that huge capacity HDD) and then it was covered in sheet steel. At that point, we had nowhere to put it so it lay beside the table. Our toddler daughter was learning to walk at that time and she came over to see me/it and sat on the box. There was a wet squelch and her overloaded nappy leaked a large quantity of liquid. I immediately yanked the power lead out of the wall and started cleaning. On removal of that steel cover, there was a completely dry inside.

An IBM advert showed an elephant standing on the case. I don't know about that but they are certainly wee proof!

The weight of the AT was almost entirely in the metalwork. The HDD only weighed a couple of pounds.

The original IBM PC was even sturdier. The BOFH could have disposed of enemies just by getting them to carry one, with resulting health problems covering his tracks.

This long predates computers. We had exactly the same with TVs in domestic environments.

The deposit left in a TV by those old paraffin heaters was even worse.

From the title I was expecting a different failure.

Back at an old job when men were men and monitors were bug bulky CRTs, one of the more... fussy... engineers had to have the absolute top of the line crystal clear picture perfect monitor available RIGHT NOW for a VERY IMPORTANT PROJECT. Granted, the project did require a monitor capable of rendering good colors at a reasonable resolution. Colors didn't need to be accurately calibrated or anything (wasn't a preprint application where you needed to see that the correct shade of orange was being used, he just needed to see that sample A was "orange" and sample B was "brownish orange").

Since the project was VERY IMPORTANT, ordering a brand new one was completely our of the question, so the best and brightest monitor in the plant was rounded up and delivered to the desk of the requesting engineer. He powered it up, and concluded it would just barely do the task required, but that the usual layer of grime on the monitor was impeding his ability to work on the project.

With some muttering about how the IT dept. should have cleaned the monitor, he grabbed a can of general purpose spray cleaner and a couple of paper towels from the bathroom dispenser, hosed down the screen, and scrubbed off the grime. The grime and most, but not quite all, of the anti-glare coating.

After the monitor dried, he fired up the VERY IMPORTANT APPLICATION, scrolled around the screen, and realized that the top of the line monitor was now barely suitable for work on spreadsheets.

He quietly shut the monitor off, unplugged it, set it on the edge of his desk, and put the old monitor back in place.

The wounded monitor sat there for a couple months IIRC. A silent reminder, or a silent warning.

To have been in the working world when people were allowed to smoke inside. Disgusting!

in the engineering game..

Pick 1 of 15(or more stories) about what should and should not be covering a computer

Including "the trackpad does'nt work" (of course it does'nt if you smear a bearing with grease then use said fingers to cover the trackpad in grease too)

"It just kinda slipped" (oily hands on the vital 'shop laptop'... thank gawd I back everything up once a week)

"the RS232 does'nt work" (especially after someone dropped it in an oil tank)

"the RS232 STILL does'nt work"(new cable was removed from socket by apprentice pulling on the cable and leaving the plug in the socket...)

and many many more..... stagnant water filter left for 9 months anyone?

We need a vomit icon