Do not touch that computer. Not even while wearing gloves. It is a biohazard
- Reference: 1711701009
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/03/29/on_call/
- Source link:
Let's start with a reader we'll Regomize as "Bill" who once repaired Apple kit for a larger retailer.
"One day a customer unit comes in and you could literally smell the thing at over 50 paces," he told On Call, explaining that the Mac in question bore the unmistakable odor of cigarettes.
[1]
Thousands of them. All breathed in the direction of one computer that now would not boot.
[2]
[3]
"As soon as I took the side cover off, the smell became several orders of magnitude worse," Bill told On Call. Opening the machine also revealed that "literally the entire inside of the case was coated in a thick layer of slime."
Bill wanted us to know that he's not exaggerating.
[4]
"'Thick layer of slime' is not hyperbolic or my taking any kind of literary license, it is a simple statement of fact," he wrote. "It was as if Slimer from Ghostbusters had flown through the computer a few times and left the entire inside coated. There were literally tar-cicles (I assume that's what it was) on the fan blades a good couple millimeters long, you could see what looked like water droplets, only made of tar, frozen in time on the walls, and dust and other miscellaneous debris had been mixed into the various layers of slime as it was laid down."
Bill's manager sympathized, to the extent that he decided this was not a job to be done without gloves.
Then on closer inspection, the boss decided the machine was too besmirched to even touch.
[5]
"Just send it back as a biohazard," Bill was told, whereupon photos were taken to prove that the machine was dangerous to his health.
After dispatching the foul box, Bill ruminated that it had survived very well given the state of its interior.
"I have a couple of hypotheses on what finally killed it," he wrote – among them that the slime both slowed the machine's fans and coated every component, eventually baking it to death.
He also suggested the slime and the tar it contained corroded some of the key electronic components. Or perhaps the slime layer produced enough electrical resistance that signals couldn't travel along the circuit board?
His eventual diagnosis was that all of the above did the deed.
The rat was 'the size of a cat'
Now let's meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Scott" who told us about his stint in the telecoms industry – including the time he was sent out to investigate cabling at an electronics workshop housed in a heritage listed building.
"The cabling passed through a barn used to store straw and corn," Scott told On Call.
He quickly found that the barn was also home to at least one "rat the size of a cat, and to cables laid in an I-beam that had become a de facto trough for corn and straw dust. The rats loved the channel of the beam as a source of food and as a literal rat run, because it was well above head height and therefore quite safe.
"The smell of straw, corn and rat droppings was oppressive," Scott recalled.
To fix the cabling, Scott had to clean that up.
"So there we were on step ladders trying desperately to replace the cabling without becoming rat bait," he told On Call. "It took us a few hours paying out cable with the head of a broom, but we succeeded."
Job done, and Scott told the client that if he ever had to clean a similar mess again, he'd charge for it. Perhaps spending the money on pest control instead would be a better investment?
[6]‘I needed antihistamine tablets every time I opened the computers’
[7]People power made payroll support in putrid places prodigiously perilous
[8]'The computer was sitting in a puddle of mud, with water up to the motherboard'
[9]Police ignored the laws of datacenter climate control
Fun with coal dust – and high voltage wires
Finally, let's meet a reader we'll call "Evan" who told us of the time he did tech in an Australian coal mine.
That gig involved all sorts of non-fun – like being required to wear masks to keep the coal dust that killed computers out of his lungs, and finding the horrid black stuff even inside computers that breathed heavily filtered air.
And then there was the terminal he was asked to fix in the diesel fitter's bay, which was filled with not just dust but had also been "agglutinated by a fine spray of diesel fumes."
But the scariest incident of all came late one night when Evan heard "the world's loudest 'twang' and had to stop work as the power went out."
"A 150-ton mine truck had driven up the 'do not drive here with the tipper tray up' road, ignored the instructions, and taken out the overhead 440V power line."
Evan didn't tell us what happened to the truck or its driver. On Call hopes it was less messy than other tales in this Dirt File.
What's the slimiest, grimiest, rimiest thing you've ever seen while doing tech support? [10]Click here to share your story and we may use it when next On Call next offers a Dirt File – probably when either the world or your correspondent takes a holiday. ®
Get our [11]Tech Resources
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[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZgafUnadEKrjhrvzfZZlLQAAABA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
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[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZgafUnadEKrjhrvzfZZlLQAAABA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/28/on_call/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/01/on_call/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/21/on_call/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/06/on_call/
[10] mailto:oncall@theregister.com
[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Nothing to see here...
I beg to differ...
It is something you cannot unsee . It is burned into your retina, haunting you the rest of your life. I'd apply for post traumatic stress compensation.
Taking the piss?
Literally! Desktop failed after a mystery medico left a paper cup of urine on top of the system box.
When I got there there wasn't any urine in the cup.......just a disgusting smell and a dead computer.
Anonymous cos I still do contract work for theses cowboys!
CompuPro S-100 boxes in cat litter plant
I've talked about the machines in a cat litter plant that was my 1st job. We baked a local variety of emathlite in a 90ft rotating kiln.
The "fines" were horrific, and one of my fortnightly jobs was tipping about a 8"-12" pile out of the S-100 boxes. The inside of the plant was a fog of the stuff, where you had to wear a mask and couldn't see more than 20'.
We had a multi-user CP/M compatible OS (MP/M 8-16) with 8bit/16bit (Z-80/8086) dual-CPUs with 40MB hard disks, networked with Arcnet, running dBase II, with dozens of Televideo & Wyse terminals. In 1982.
A cat litter mining company didn't really need that, but the owners were serious computer geeks. Some of the most fun I've had in my life. I wish I'd been more than a mostly-useless spotty teenager. I wrote code to emulate a TWX connection to the railroad companies to track our shipping cars. At 110 baud. I remember the super expensive Hayes Smartmodem 1200 coming out AND YOU COULD CONTROL IT WITH THESE "AT" COMMAND THINGS instead of toggling some of the serial handhaking lines!
Tarcicles and Tardrops
and dust-tar webs. Yes, I can confirm, they are real.
Re that tobacco tar in the computer - now imagine the state of the user's lungs.
Why? They wouldn't have them for long.
What happened to the truck or its driver?
Probably nothing. The trucks are pretty tough, snapping cabling won't affect it. And the vehicle has great big insulators called "tires" under it. The driver should also be fine. as long as he doesn't try to get out while live wires are contacting the rig ... it's bridging the gap between charged vehicle and ground that kills you. Remember that next time you take out a power pole and can't see where the wires are. Stay put until first responders tell you it's safe to get out.
Re: What happened to the truck or its driver?
We had something similar at our place. Contractor with a mini-digger (tracks, not tires) put a concrete hammer through a main feed line to the house. Not his fault - some nitwit had only buried it a cm under the surface.
One big fat spark later, both he and the machine are ok, but next door has a power cut.
We called NIE sharpish and got them to repair the line and bury it at a decent depth.
Re: What happened to the truck or its driver?
Vehicle tyres (tires!) are electrically conducting. This is to avoid the build-up of static charges which would reach a truly frightening magnitude only to be experienced on stepping out.......
The metal truck provides very good protection to the driver. As you say, don't move until someone with a voltmeter (an appropriate voltmeter....) advises the lines are safe.
Burned Cow Bones
a job I had previously, we needed to clean out the server room and servers for a company that made Carbon filter material - by burning Cow Bones - the fine black soot was everywhere - it took us a couple of days and a lot of cleaning supplies to get the room even half decent.
Lovely - was sneezing it out for a week.
Please fix your hoist.
In Orkney the Highland Park distillery was out of action for months when a lorry with its onboard hoist sticking up, crashed through some overhead pipes over the road. The pipe was carrying waste, so it was not a "whisky galore" situation.
Re: Please fix your hoist.
I was called to visit a new brewery which reported an 'instrument error' because the vessels containing the finished product were both indicating 'Empty'..... This wasn't a sensor failure, it was a control problem (outside our scope). The valves were incorrectly labelled so instead of sending the product to bottling they had discharged 20,000 gallons of beer into the drain.....
The brewery had bought the ingredients, made the beer, paid duty on the product and thrown it away. As the icing on the cake, or perhaps froth on the pint, the local water company charged them for polluting the waterways.
I had a maintenance contract ...
... for the computers and comms gear at a cinder operation just outside Baker, California. The computers had a constant supply of grinding compound filtering through them, despite the best air filters that money could buy filtering the air for the offices where the computers were located. I preemptively replaced the computer filters monthly, and all the cooling fans, everywhere, quarterly. We still lost the odd fan off-schedule. Volcanic ash and cinder dust is the absolute worst thing you can do to moving parts. Fortunately the Boss/owner proclaimed the site non-smoking ...
Following BSE in cattle...
All UK cattle had (and probably still have, for all I know) a 'passport' or ID document. In the early days, this was a sheet of paper that followed the animal from farm to farm, right to the slaughterhouse. This document was then scanned and the image uploaded for the barcodes, dates and so on to be read and injected into a database. Except for when the paper was too messed-up to process. I'll leave it an exercise for the reader to deduce the state some documents got into and the subsequent effect this had on the delicate internals of the scanner hardware. It wasn't pretty.
Re: Following BSE in cattle...
My dad retired from farming a few years back, but as far as I'm aware, they still have passports and have been expanding use to other animals. Thankfully, it's mostly done online these days; I had to help my mum the first time she used the portal and was pleasantly surprised at how well it was design from a UI/UX perspective. It was remarkably easy to use and work with and this was something like 20 years ago when web design wasn't as advanced as now. Shocking that a government IT project could actually work well!
Sparky the Axe-Man
Back in my days of jobs during university holidays, one was working for a department store alongside the maintenance man and his apprentice. Much of the time we were building or moving counters, changing signs and light fittings, etc. One day, the apprentice and I were tasked to clean out an old workroom underneath the reupholstering workshop; the place was thick with dust and fibres that had dropped through the floor above - it was an old building that was going to be refurbished. The biggest part of our work that day was stripping the old wall cladding with picks and axes - it was quite fun being paid to be vandals! Fun, that is, until the apprentice took a swing, with his axe, at a wall down which there was a large cable. I'd turned and noticed it whilst he was in mid swing, too late for him to stop. Luckily the resulting flash as he sliced through the buildings main power feed didn't ignite the dust - and all went easily quiet around us.
OK, nothing to do with computers but it was a nice big spark...
I don't want to think about it
Devices and plant which were contaminated caused a lot of consternation amongst staff. We started charging an exorbitant extra for cleaning, in fact we were building in a price for replacement. The problem disappeared very quickly. We demanded a 'decontamination certificate'.
Strictly speaking, items in a hazardous state should not be sent by 'normal' transport.
Nothing to see here...
Computer used in harsh environment succumbs to said environment.