Strewth!

...when a random techie could still wander into a mine without sitting through a bunch of safety briefings.

What on Earth was the point ? It was a mini. Put it on the surface and snake a cable down to wherever to put a terminal at the bottom.

That's about as stupid as putting backup power generators in the basement of a building that might get flooded. No, you put them on the roof.

Just how deep do you think the flood is going to be? Do we need to be collecting animals again?

Ask TEPCO.

“ Do we need to be collecting animals again?” - new keyboard please Sam!

At a guess - the maximum cable length for the terminal wasn't enough to reach from the surface and nobody thought to look into something carrier based and install modems.

RFC 2549 was not yet proposed either

I thought that was pigeons, not sure if canaries are as reliable….

not sure if canaries are as reliable….

For this type of deployment, they are a potential choke point.

I did have an issue at one employer, computers stood on the floor in a factory office with work boots frequently in close vicinity. I encouraged them to put the computers on desks but to no avail, "there's not enough room if we do that!" Computers were much larger then of course! We ended up with purchasing floor stands which helped a bit but any time you needed to work on those a vacuum cleaner was required.

Like many people, the biggest issue, back when smoking in offices was common practice, and occasionally since with wfh, is tobacco. I've had laptops returned that I would only handle with rubber gloves (and I'm not squeamish about such things) and that were impossible to clean and reissue. Some keyboards were positively disgusting, with ash, food scraps, etc. as well.

I was lucky enough that from my first job (in 1997) all the offices I've worked in were no smoking. But we had a client back in those days who was a large Tobacco firm - if I had visited them I walked through the door and got undressed. And then more recently even though the office is no smoking, one person was senior enough that she smoked in her own office. And her keyboard was as you described it...

As far as I'm concerned, keyboards and mice are consumables, and if I get a particularly gross example I'll chuck it in the bin without a second thought.

Well I have been to several nasty places to support IT things.

I supported a pair of Netware 4.11 severs in Portharcourt, Nigera, which while the place was ok, it had the dirtiest power ...

For physical dirt it would be a toss up between some peoples houses as a service engineer, and a server in a diesel train depot in Scotland.

Hhmmm all those lovely oily particulates all over the outside and inside of the case.....

As an electrician now, I heartily concur.

I've been in places where BEHIND the cooker is the cleanest place in the kitchen.

I used to be a chimney sweep and there were a few houses I did where I wiped my feet on the way out.

Scene of crime visits could be nasty and some of the nasty bits got brought into the lab. A colleague had a sofa brought in; it stood around for weeks for some reason and had to be given a wide berth - the little buggers can jump. In fact fleas were a (fortunately infrequent) occupational hazard. But the nastiest job was removing bits of a bomber who'd scored an own goal from bits of his clothing so the latter could be shown to his family for identification.

The dirtiest place i've ever had to work was in a metal workshop.

He didn't have an office, all space was dedicated to stacking piles of scrap or for projects he was working on.

The poor little printer he had out there had stopped working. It was covered in a layer of metal dust, and the humidity from it being a large, cold hall with open garage doors didn't help either.

He actually built a protective box for the replacement printer himself, it was very well made and kept the filth out! We ended up commissioning him for a similar cabinet for a lumber yard.

I used to use an Aircraft restoration company for building very nice bespoke test equipment enclosures.

The A30 in the 80's/90's.

The M5 services closed as they were jammed.

We used to hate going down there in summer.

I live in Fife now and spring when the camper vans come out of hibernation and begin their annual migration north is almost as bad.

Aaarghhh

You just gotta love the grockles...

(a former yokel, now in the land of the wild haggis)

We call them Emmets in Cornwall, Grockles is D*von speak...

Only to to told, that's not ordinary dust those printers have come from the local Crematoria and what I thought was dust was ash

They'd become part of the matrix ...

Ashes to ashes, data to dust.

I used to work for a government department in Liverpool. The 20 storey tower block we worked in had been the subject of one of the longest running strikes in British history - the main fabricof the building went up - walls and floors. heating and AC ducts etc, but no windows and doors, before the site was picketed by building workers for over three years. During this period all of the local feral cats moved in as they had found an ideal home.

When the strike eventually ended the site managers realised it would be impossible to round up and expell the sitting tenants, so they covered all openings in plastic sheeting and pumped the shell full of poison gas, then continued the fit-out, removing any corpses they found. They probably foundabout 20% of them.

Several years later , we used to come in to work every day to find our desks sprinkled with a grey, gritty substance which management insisted was coal dust from the nearby coal shipping dock. We all knew that it was mummified cat dust!

The building, St John's House, was officially the "sickest" building in Europe, and this is what they eventually did to cure the problem! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3i2baydpCM

I hadn't long been at the company I'm at now when we were all sent home for COVID. Eventually the office reopened and some office staff were allowed back on site. But you had to keep the whole 2m distance etc. The other thing with all of this though is that I hadn't really gotten to know my coworkers so I was still putting names to faces and getting to know what everyone was like.

One chap is on a spectrum of his own. He's lovely but very quirky and the littlest bit of IT trouble he goes in to a panic. I am really not over stating this. I was on a remote call with him and he once tried to delete Outlook because he had clicked on the button to hide the ribbon bar because he wanted it gone from his machine. He found the Mail app and deleted it thinking it was Outlook, but as Outlook was still there he got in to more of a panic. It's something I soon learned about him and whenever he has an IT problem I know to treat him with kid gloves. We've a good working relationship now.

One day though, during this period of 2m separation, he had a problem with his laptop. Fine, I'll be right over. Masked up and walked over and it was the first time I had gone near his laptop in person. We had given everyone keyboards to bring home with them and use in the office. Honest to God, I have never seen a keyboard covered in dust, cat hair, and dried white liquid substance. It was grim, and I thought there is no way I'm touching that. I used COVID as an excuse and said I would use his laptop keyboard to type on for that reason. He was fine with it. As soon as I finished I doused my hands in hand sanitiser.

I learnt 3 months after this that he's an erotic novelist too. So while I would like to think the substances were just cake icing (as he often says his wife makes cakes and he eats it over the keyboard), knowing that about him, and the state of the keyboard, I'd say it's a biohazard. What makes it worse though is that we have since given people a keyboard and mouse to use in the office (separate to the one at home) and his work keyboard is no where near as grim.

The worst environment I encountered computer equipment was a tyre factory. Absolutely everything in a layer a black dust. Miracle anything functioned at all.

Reprographics offices have their own black dust. I learned to take a replacement floppy drive if I thought I might have to reinstall anything. The days when you could install things from floppies...

I had heard rumours that some Cornish tin mines were considering re-opening due to the increase in the world price of tin.

Here is one from March 2023:

https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/cornwalls-last-tin-mine-plans-8217474

TLDR : It says that the mine closed in 1988.

Maybe a mincomputer is still down there waiting to be re-booted (after receiving its "once-in-a millenium clean").

I read somewhere recently that one is reopening as they can also extract Lithium from it, and there is a world shortage, mainly due to battery manufacture.

It's probably under several hundred feet of water. I believe those mines were wet and filled up once the pumps stopped.

While working in the networks division in ntl many years back, we had a few hundred DHCP servers scattered around the country, including peoples garden sheds, a partitioned off stall in a pub toilet, etc. Theses were eventually consolidated onto new hardware in data centres an number of years later.

Fortunately the old servers were Sun E450's - which were nigh on bulletproof, and still worked happily with layers of leaves and other detritus in them.

Had to clean up a laptop returned by a field service tech, before i could fix it.

Was wiping mud of the body when i was informed that it wasn't mud, it was splashed while in a sewage works..

The absolute worst though was one where i was cleaning what i assumed was tobacco ash from the keyboard, and when i pointed out it was bad for the computer he said "its not ash, i have a skin condition"

That how i learned to ask BEFORE i handle the PCs.

On site dirt: Machines in Lime quarry. replacement policy was to buy a new machine, set it up for someone in the office, their old machine would replace the dead one out on site, to give at least some life span out of them. The Aircon for the computer room needed work every 3 years when the lime dust killed its external unit too.

Coffee company: all the desktop machines had between 3 and 5 cm of coffee grounds they had pulled out of the air in the bottom of the mini tower cases..

Machines that came into the workshop for work: "mouse issue" turned out to be "mouse has made a nest in the amstrad 486 AIO and used the motherboard as it's toilet"

Did a stint as a onsite support at a place called Devro - they take cow skins in at one end and push out sausage skins and other collagen stuff for food products at the end.

There was always a slightly tacky sensation on every surface and you'd invariably leave site smelling like a dog treat.

We had a task to replace some hardward on the shop floor, upgrade some RAM, basic stuff.

Opening the case can only be described as appearing like a prop from the Reactor building in Aliens. Peeling a layer of film off the motherboard was also rather grim.