A crashppuccino?

As there were two processors it could have been a "double espresso".

Did Martin go flat-white when it happened?

Did Martin go flat-white when it happened

Of course, as this accident was definitely grounds for dismissal...

Were the people no longer allowed in the room told to fucoffee?

Short one, dark roast.

Ever opened a computer that had drank the coffee, and didn't keel over? One that keep running and was only opened during a schedule routine maintenance? Ughhh, what a horrible smell, what a gooey mess, I think it was cafe au lait...

I haven't bean that (un)lucky

No, but I've had to clean out a few keyboards that have been taken out by a judiciously placed drink or two. That can be... interesting.

A friend managed to spill espresso across her laptop. Fortunately she had the presence of mind to pull the power and the battery straight away, and then brought it to me for a once over before trying to turn it back on.

(If only our users were as sensible as our friends!).

Apart from a bit of cleaning, it was basically ok, but as soon as it warmed up, the scent of espresso began to waft.

She was quite happy with her coffee-scented laptop, but personally I can't stand the smell or taste of the stuff :(

One of our sales reps spilled coffee on his laptop keyboard. He managed to get it as clean as he could and then that's where his issues started - he used a hairdryer to dry off the keyboard, whose keys promptly began to melt.

He confessed immediately, brought his laptop in that day and was absolutely delighted when we were able to replace his keyboard with one from a dead laptop. He bought us a nice big tub of chocolates by way of thanks.

That the change in procedures would be more concerned with forbidding any liquids than with who could enter.

After all, it wasn't George's coffee that caused the problem.

Heard the story about some minion who was continually pestering IT for a computer upgrade. He was told to his face that the only reason for an upgrade was if his machine died.

He asked if accidentally spilling a cup of coffee would kill the machine. When it was confirmed that that would definitely send the machine to PC heaven, he opened the lid and poured his cup of sugary coffee over the motherboard.

He got the computer upgrade.

I had somebody do this circa 2000 when they wanted an upgrade from a ~450 Mhz Pentium II PC to the brand new 1Ghz boxes; so as your chap did they blew their PC up. (though I think they did theirs by flipping the PSU switch to 120v and getting a large BOOM when the PSU blew)

Given that the firm was a partnership, I pointed out to the partner responsible for him that it was almost certainly deliberate, and that giving the user a new PC would encourage a large spate of "accidental" destruction of PC's. Since in a partnership, the replacements basically came out of the partners pocket he displayed a humorous smile and then asked what the slowest computer we had available was.

The user ended up with a elderly Pentium I box saved from the scrap pile that if I recall rightly did 133Mhz and was only just barely capable of running Windows, which he kept for something like 9 months before the partner decided us to give him an upgrade: to a Pentium II box freed up from somebody else who'd had a new PC.

Everybody else in the office was fully aware of what had happened, and it appeared to have deterred everybody from killing anything else.

Not as serious but I did, many years ago, manage to spill half a mug of coffee into an HP monitor. Fortunately it was unsweetened, an immediate power off and leaving it to drain/dry overnight and it continued working without any issues.

In my experience it's sugary soft drinks that do the most damage - Fanta in a keyboard resulted in a full strip down and scrub under the tap (back when keyboards were expensive but robust enough to stand such treatment). Full fat coke in a laptop, then ignored for a couple of days, was far more damaging - result was a new laptop due to the damage caused.

One of those orange drinks applied by one of my kids (and no knowledge of what is now well known maintenance techniques) wrote off one of my IBM Model Ms. It actually glued the membrane together, and trying to peel it apart pulled the conductive tracks off. Repainting with conductive paint did not restore the function.

Of course, now I know you can wash Model Ms, and it is even possible to purchase new membranes (from Unicomp), but I ended up discarding it. I really should have kept it longer, or as spare parts, something I regret now.

Asides from the sugar making the fluid sticky, tends to contain liberal amounts of citric acid, to make the sugars bearable to the human palate ... sticky+acidic=nasties

Modern keyboards are still robust enough to scrub in the sink, I had to do it just last week to a cheapy HP model.

I did remove the electronics first, I'm sure they'd have been fine with a bit of tap water, but I'd have had to wait longer to make sure they were dry. I also already had to take the keyboard apart to clean it properly.

During a refresh years ago we discovered that coffee would if spilt under a pc (big beige compaq units) and wasn’t cleaned up it would glue the machine to the desk.

We found this was the case when to get the old machine off the desk we had to resort to levering it up and in a couple of cases it took the surface laminate off as well.

One place I was in had the machines in little slings under the desk to maximise desk-space. As a result, I can confirm that spilt coffee will also glue monitor stands to the desk!

One of my aged relatives used to train Public Telephone Switchboard Operators for a living. At that time, the operators were required to have a minimum height, so they could reach the highest sockets on the switchboard, and were under strict instructions to drink coffee without milk or sugar. Apparently, plain coffee was not fatal to the switchboard, but milk or sugar would make it unrecoverable.

[1]https://malditech.corriere.it/files/2016/09/Telephone-switchboard-operators-in-WW-1957-2.jpg

[2]https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Photograph_of_Women_Working_at_a_Bell_System_Telephone_Switchboard_%283660047829%29.jpg

[1] https://malditech.corriere.it/files/2016/09/Telephone-switchboard-operators-in-WW-1957-2.jpg

[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Photograph_of_Women_Working_at_a_Bell_System_Telephone_Switchboard_%283660047829%29.jpg

Never had a problem with drink.

Had a monitor that was arcing out because of a hair. Blew it out and it was fine. And a keyboard that was basically a biohazard given the amount of old food that came out of it when turned upside down and given a shake.

Oh - but been through a few of the old mice with all manner of junk caught in the inner workings .

"Never had a problem with drink."

Lucky you.

(Mine's the one with the "One Day" chip in the pocket, with the hip flask...)

One day, back in the now long gone years when I was putting my coffee cup 5 cm close to my laptop, I managed to pour all the full cup in the PCMCIA slot of the laptop.

I remember well the "click" sound followed by a loud silence hinting at laptop dead.

Now I always put the cup 40 cm away :)

a genius widely regarded as "harmless".

So he is now "Mostly harmless"?

I can confirm that the old Apricot PC's with amber screen, 20 Mb HDD (helpfully A: not C:) and the calculator built into the keyboard do not respond well to vending machine vegetable soup... in fact they never respond to anything again. (Thankfully it was not my soup)

Hazy memories of being a spotty youth on work experience at a local computer company, being the only person that could fix a common fault with the Oki laser printers (small fingers) and discovering a floppy filled with ascii pron (some of it was even animated).

(helpfully A: not C:)??

And does anything respond well to vending machine vegetable soup? I never did understand why they decided to use non-water soluble ingredients in it/

I wonder where they are now?

I have witnessed the result of a poorly-placed CRT encountering an entire pint of lager. Spectacular light show, copious smoke and one fire-alarm induced evacuation later management were persuaded to relocate the monitor away from the end of the reception desk nearest the bar....

I like how it was the CRT that was poorly placed, rather than the lager :-)

My beloved employers invoked their service contract to send someone to my house to sort their very expensive CRT monitor when it stopped working. The chap who came got it working and very kindly agreed not to say anything about the large quantity of vomit he had to remove from the HT side of things. After that I discouraged the cat from sleeping on top of the monitor.

I arrived at work one morning to be greeted with the news that "someone tried to install Java on one of the MFD printers, and it didn't work".

As I was pre-coffee myself, it took me a while to work out what they meant. When I got upstairs, I found that someone had put a pint of freshly brewed coffee on the sorter unit of the MFD (cost ~£20,000), and proceeded to print out their days instruction booklets. Whereupon the sorted had duly started moving up and and down rapidly, and spilled the pint of coffee into the printer.

Fortunately this user was only a partial idiot, and had turned the printer off to prevent anything too bad from happening... so I separated all the parts I could, and we dried as much as we could with paper towels, and then I raised a ticket with our printe management company. Who turned up a couple of hours later, and miraculously, nothing had gotten inside it.

It did smell nice for a couple of weeks though!

All is forgiven (or should be), as

- they did react correctly

and (more importantly)

- it was their first coffee, I guess. Mitigating circumstances, right? (... please...)