Came looking for a Friday On Call, nothing to be seen.

But, Lo, here it is, shyly peeking out of Personal Tech.

Come on out, we're not going to hurt you, everyone is nice here.

(Leaps onto very short "story", demanding to know if that is all we're getting, I waited a whole week for *this*?)

Yes, this one was short and fast, but had oh so much potential... too bad they didn't take more than 3 minutes to work it up. If I find an extra 10 minutes today, I'll rewrite it myself and re-post it.

Yeah, there's something in the tea at Vulture Central. Can we still use that term? Vulture Central? Now kissing the ring on the hand that feeds IT? WTF!

I fear 2023 will be a boring year as told by Reg.com

"Hey! You! Put those under the workstations" ... whilst indicating the pile of brand new unboxed mats...

For full irony or a BOFH moment, were the anti-static mats wrapped with nicely static inducing polythene bags?

So that the act of placing a box of them under a device would actually generate the static charge they were hoping to alleviate.....

***** Bring Back the Moderatrix! *****

Yes - Sarah !

Many, many years ago, at a previous employer and long before I'd had my ESD training, I had someone in another company office ship me a PC base unit. It arrived swathed in around 25 feet of bubble wrap which the person sending said was anti-static bubble wrap. I duly unwrapped the PC and when I went to pick it up a spark over 4 inches long shot out from the base unit to one of my fingers and there was an almighty CRACK! To say it hurt is an understatement.

Needless to say, when I plugged the base unit in it was completely dead, so I logged a call and an engineer came and swapped out the motherboard and RAM.

When I called the person who shipped me the base unit and told them they said, "But I used the pink anti-static bubble wrap." I replied, "No, this was clear." They just murmured, "Oh, shit."

If it was pink AND clear, you'd both be right.

(My chemistry teacher used to go to great lengths to drum into us that Colourless and Clear are not the same thing)

Cardboard is an insulator, so the junior was just ensuring the cardboard was used first before it desintegrated and the antistatic mats would only be unpacked and used in Phase II of the project just like my aunt who never removed the protective film from her TV and asked me how she should glue it back on because "it kept coming loose"

First to her horror while I ripped it off!

Second only to her smugness after I removed it and explained that it should have been removed years ago and her exclaiming "So basically, I have a brand spanking new TV now???"

I just said "yes" and made her day!

A few years ago I heard about a spate of TVs being returned to dealers, with complaints about poor audio volume and quality. Turned out that there was a thin strip of clear plastic along the bottom which covered the speakers and many people had not noticed it when unwrapping their new TV.

Cardboard box? Luxury!

(Sorry. I couldn't resist. I've never wanted to be a lion tamer. I've always wanted to be a systems analyst.)

Back in the early days of PC's we bought a range of very expensive machines for developers, one of the 'benefits' was that each screen came with a privacy screen attached to it, the management thought this was a good idea as the team worked on police systems. In reality they made the screen slightly blurry much worse than our mainframe terminals and also almost completely prevented co working when looking into a problem as both programmers had to somehow get their heads directly in line with the 14 inch screen.

When we deployed some to user offices one used did attempt to remove the 'protective screen' making the device unusable as the CRTY was covered in lumps of resin and torn plastic.

A final 'benefit' was that if you touched the screen with the end of your pen to show someone which line to look at the ink was instantly absorbed into the plastic, so we had a number of blurry rainbow colored devices nobody wanted to use. Our next batch of PC's were Compaq's dearer, but bigger screens you could read and share

I've trained my co-workers to never -ever- touch my screen. With anything.

They might not have a problem with their own screens looking like they've been smeared with vaseline & lard, but that's because they're animals.

1000% this!

A 45 cm plastic ruler as a LART for any digit or object approaching mine. It's become a reflex. They all get fair warning.

*Sometimes* I apologise for being more enthusiastic than I meant to be at the application.

It's not like I'm looking at diagnostic images... wait. I am.

How my co-workers manage to work with their smeared screens is beyond me.

Icon 'cos it is discipline!

Hm, not sure how that static electricity was going to get inside the Faraday cage? Anyway, you should possibly hire better help if the colleagues are not capable of figuring out that equipment should be unboxed.

All I can think is that if the company were so cheap as to leave machines on the floor, then the poor techie assumed the cardboard boxes were all that would be provided for static protection.

Does one presume that the office was locked at night ?

Otherwise some bright spark could have "picked them up and run with them"

Who leaves PCs on the floor? Buy a desk.

£3K workstations on the floor under desks all around my department to avoid cluttering the acres of free bench top space.

Mostly on vinyl, a few on carpet.

Apologies - no IT connection, but it isn't totally irrelevant:

I'm reminded of the time when, on a student placement, I needed some Rockwool to test as a replacement for asbestos (this was in 1973, at a company making friction materials, e.g. brake pads). A large cardboard box arrived and the lab tech was tasked by the manager with unpacking it for use. I arrived at the lab later, to find the Rockwool strewn everywhere and a frustrated tech desperately trying to find what had been so carefully packed (and worried he might have damaged whatever it was, being so fragile). I calmed him down to explain it was the "packaging" that we wanted, so could he, please, help me gather it up and place it in a work bin, being careful to separate out any contaminants. Luckily, the minimum order quantity was more than I needed for my initial experiments.

TL:DR My experiments were a partial success - I found it could be used but, in order to be useful, the entire vehicle braking system (for which it would have been destined) would need replacing.