1. Index
  2. Literature
  3. Tech Support Humour
  4. Hardware Abuse

Midimusic.org.uk Computer Humour, Hardware

2.12 Hardware Abuse

Some of the things people do to computers is downright painful.

Recently, I got a call from someone who turned off his computer whenever he found himself somewhere in Windows he didn't want to be. "I just turn it off when I don't like where I am," he said. Wonder of all wonders, scandisk found a score of lost allocation units and bad sectors.

A man purchased a laptop from me. He called about a week later and said that it would no longer boot up. He brought it in, and I discovered that sixteen nicely drilled holes were in the bottom of the case. I asked him about it, and he said the machine was too hot sitting on his lap, so he had drilled these "air holes."

"Could that be the problem?" he asked.

A friend of mine (who shall remain nameless) bought a brand new Toshiba laptop computer last year since his "old" one was a model from the year before. He worked in the computer services office on campus here at our university. He decided one night that to impress his co-workers he would make his new laptop more decorative. He bought a can of emerald green Krylon spray paint and sprayed his entire computer (screen, mouse, keyboard, casing, and all) with it. He was shocked to find that his computer wouldn't work afterwards and decided the paint must be at fault. So the next day he bought a can of Goo Gone and a bottle of paint thinner and poured them both on his computer, then rinsed it off in the sink.

Again, he was shocked when his computer wouldn't work. He was even more shocked when Circuit City told him they wouldn't refund his money or exchange his computer for a new one.

A customer came into the store one day to return an internal modem, which he had purchased a few days earlier. He complained that it would not work. I took the modem out of the package and could scarcely believe my eyes.

The card had been filed down to about half its original size.

Ten years ago, I was working for a company selling computerized cash registers. A customer called in to help me with a cash register that didn't connect to the back office computer.

About a year ago, I was called out to do field service. When I got to the lady's house and was let in, the first thing I noticed was the smell of gunpowder. The second, the double barreled 12-gauge shotgun lying on the couch. Third, the big gaping hole in the side of her computer. (It was one of those Macs where the CPU and monitor are in the same housing.)

I looked at her. She was a little grey haired woman, around 60 or so. Had she? Not possible. Still, I had to ask.

I mumbled something about not being a Mac tech and told her I would send one out as soon as I could. Then I burned rubber out of there.

About a month later, my boss called me in; he had the woman on hold. She had apparently complained that I was not competent and that I had lied when I said I would send out a competent Mac tech -- or perhaps I just hadn't been able to find anyone competent working for us. I filled him in. He paused for a second, picked up the phone, and said, "Ma'am? Did you put a shotshell into your computer? ... Uh huh...I'm sorry, ma'am, we really can't...well, no.... I'll try to send one out.... Nice doing business with you...." He hung up, looked at me, and said, "You think any of our Mac techs will go?" I shook my head. "Me neither."

We heard from her again last week, when my boss told me that the woman had called up to cuss me out, saying not only was I a "young whippersnapper" but also a liar, since one of our competitors had fixed her computer just fine, even fixing the little scratches and stuff on the monitor glass. That sounded fishy, so I went over and talked with the techs. After a case of canned drinks and a few bags of junk food, I wormed the whole story out of them. Apparently, about the only salvagable part was the hard drive (which the buckshot had missed), so they took it out, went out and bought a whole new computer, slapped the hard drive in, and presented it to the lady as her repaired computer -- of course charging her an arm and a leg.

It became apparent that the customer, in his wisdom, had destroyed the Windows registry and deleted just about everything he needed to run Windows.

Bang! Bang!

I dissolved into fits of laughter.

A friend of mine asked me to take a look at her computer. She said the computer was unusually "quiet" and would reboot itself on occasion. I surmised correctly that the fan on her power supply was faulty. She was a chain smoker and apparently smoked a lot while working on the computer; not only was the power supply fan gummed up with revolting tar and nicotine, but the CPU's cooling fan was clogged beyond use, and the cdrom drive drawer would not open. This is the only computer I have ever worked on that died from smoking.

I do PC support for a national waste disposal company. I troubleshooted a PC in Alabama once. The PC gave a disk error when it was turned on. I placed a system disk floppy in the drive and tried to boot off that, but it didn't work. Then, when I removed the disk, it was covered in dirt. I opened the computer and found several inches of caked mud on the inside. I asked the site supervisor about it. He told me there had been a flood, but they had cleaned off the PC.

A friend of mine was calling in, complaining that his computer suddenly making very strange noises. knowing that I am a computer tech guy he asked if I could fix it. So I went there, and his computer really did sound strange, and both the disk drive and the cdrom drive appeared to be dead. So I opened the case, unplugged the disk drive and the cdrom, and the strange sound was gone.

I opened the case and I found both the cdrom drive and the disk drive had turned green and brown with rust.

I'm in charge of the computer network in a small mall, which includes a cafe. The cafe had an old 386 desktop machine, handling billing. Originally, the machine was placed on the floor, elevated by a small wooden block, because that floor was washed daily. When I had to service that machine, I discovered the block was missing and the bottom of the machine was rusted, as if it came from the bottom of the ocean. (Surprisingly, it still worked.)

During a college course, we were being showed how to plug all the components of a PC together properly. Getting a little bored, I glanced over at the student next to me fumbling with all his cords and bending all the way over the desk to see the rear of the PC (apparently it was too difficult for him to turn it around). While he was doing so, I turned the brightness knob on his monitor all the way over so that when he finally got the cables plugged in the correct order, nothing was on his screen. I leaned over to "help." I said, "Let me see if this works," and slapped the side of the monitor while inconspicuously turning the brightness knob back up with my other hand. The next time he turned around, I turned the brightness knob back down again and left the room. When I came back, the poor guy was beating that monitor senseless.

I was talking to a fellow co-worker on the phone yesterday:

A client called Wednesday afternoon. Her computer was dead. All our field techs were booked for the day, so we sent one out first thing Thursday morning. The problem was gone.

Next Wednesday she called again. Thursday morning the tech arrived. No problem.

Next Wednesday she called again. Thursday morning the tech arrived. No problem.

He brought the computer in for service. I ran the computer two days on diagnostics with no problem, and we returned the computer.

Next Wednesday she called again. Thursday morning the tech arrived. No problem.

The following Wednesday, we had a tech sit with her all day. At lunchtime, she watered her plants, which, in turned out, she did every Wednesday at lunch. The plant above the computer started leaking.

A woman called to report that her CD-ROM was no longer working. After going through the standard troubleshooting procedures, I asked her when this problem started.

I went on site for a system that had no display. I tried another video card, but the system seemed really dead. When I asked the user for more details, she said that someone had put a password on the CMOS, and she wanted to get rid of it. She had read in a PC repair book about using a jumper to clear the CMOS, which is true for some systems. But when she opened the case, she found quite a few jumpers on the motherboard. Undeterred, she began rearranging all of the jumpers (with the system turned on). Hard to say which component fried first. Oh well, time to upgrade anyhow.

I've worked in a software store for a couple years now. I've had more than person irate that we sold them a Playstation CD that doesn't work on a computer, a computer CD that doesn't work on a Playstation, and even someone who wanted Windows 95 for the Playstation. But none of these compare to this one user:

On Friday, a man came in, carefully browsed the store, and purchased a brand new copy of James Bond 007 for the Nintendo 64. I sold him a strategy guide to go with it at a 20% discount and sent him happily on his way. I happened to be working the next day when he stormed back in. He spotted me and came running down the store, vaguely resembling a freight train.

"You idiot! This" -- shoving the game in my face -- "doesn't work in my system! I couldn't make it fit at all! And I just brought the system brand new, so it's a bad game, and I WANT MY MONEY BACK BECAUSE YOU'RE SELLING BAD PRODUCTS!!!"

Well, it was within our seven day return policy, so I calmly accepted the package and proceeded to open it to make sure it was still in saleable condition. To my great astonishment, it had apparently been neatly trimmed down to around 3 1/2 inches with some sort of saw.

"Siiiir..? What happened to this game?"

"Nothing! I just cut it to fit in my Compaq! It should work -- I just bought it!"

When the customer brought the motherboard and CPU in, I could not keep myself from laughing. He had installed the CPU into an ISA slot. He had actually cut the housing of the Pentium II CPU to make it fit.

Hi I just talked to [a PC retailer], and they told me to call you. A water main in our house broke, and 85 gallons of water got dumped on my PC. It's insured, but the insurance company will only cover the parts I can prove are bad. I think it's dry now; can you help me troubleshoot it?

A guy calls because he wants to register his Macintosh Performa and needs to know where the serial numbers are on the computer and modem.

Our tech support had a guy call in about a bad powerbook monitor. It had tire treads on the left side of the screen. He repositioned his windows to the right, and it kind of worked. Apparently, the powerbook was on the hood of his car, fell off, and he backed over it. It still booted, but the tire marks were very visible on the screen.

A friend worked for a company that made IC's. Every few months, their yields would go down to about zero. Analysis of the failures showed all sorts of organic material was introduced in the process, but they couldn't figure out where. One evening, someone was working late and came into the lab. There he found the maintainence crew cooking pizza in the chip curing ovens!

We sold a new Pentium to a new customer. After only a day or two it was back in the shop. She was complaining about many errors she was getting in Windows: a number of general protection faults, disk read/write errors, etc. We brought the system to our shop, ran some tests...everything checked out fine, so we sent it back.

Again a call came in from her, complaining about the same errors. We ran some tests, everything was fine, and we sent the machine back. By the fourth call, we decided there must be something in her office that was causing the problems, so we asked her about microwave ovens, etc. Nothing like that was anywhere near her computer, according to her, so we sent a technician over to take a look. After five minutes on site the system worked fine. The technician removed the two dozen or so refrigerator magnets that she had been decorating her computer with.

Recently we were trying to talk one of our customers through an installation of an SBUS card in a Sun SPARCstation 20. About halfway through the install, at a point where we had the top off the machine and had been swapping RAM, moving hard drives, and moving SBUS cards around for a while, one of the people at the remote site commented that "funny things" were happening on her monitor. It was at that point that I realized that she had never turned the computer off.

I delivered and setup a PC in an office, gave some small training, and agreed to follow up a week later. When I returned, the monitor was off the top of the PC and a typewriter in its place. The secretary felt the PC made a better typewriter stand than her desk.

A customer called complaining that his keyboard no longer worked. The customer had cleaned his keyboard by submerging it for a day in warm soapy water in his bathtub.

Once I was sitting at my desk, and a clerical worker came back and told me that her terminal was putting all sorts of garbage on the screen. I walked back to her desk/office and looked around -- there was a rather large wet spot on the floor, and an empty glass on the desk. I lifted the keyboard off the desk by the cord, and water literally poured out of it. She said, "Oh! Could that be the problem?"

I once made the mistake of telling a customer to take his machine to a gas station and have them blow the dust out. I didn't figure on the gas station handing him a 150psi air nozzle that belches rusty water and oil.

One technician had forgotten to turn the printer off. What happened? He lost his screwdriver, and it fell so awkwardly that it shorted the electrolytics in the power supply. The resulting ccurrent was so high, that it literally "welded" the screwdriver to the connections, so that he afterwards could carry the power supply out of the house just by lifting his screwdriver

Last year a guy called and said his cdrom won't work after he installed it. I asked him to bring it in. while testing out the other drives, I noticed it was really slick.

Once we had a customer bring his system into our service center. He seemed to know a little about computers but thought he was an expert, so as soon as I started to ask a few basic questions about his hard drive problems, he said, "Look, I know that it's the hard drive thats stick because when I do this it works again." As he spoke, he lifted the back of the tower off the bench by about four inches and dropped it.

My jaw dropped by about the same amount, and my supervisor, who was nearby at the time, just stared at the system. I recovered enough to say, "Well, we'll take care of it now, so why don't I just take that over here...."

Apparently he had been using this method to get his system going for the past three months, but lately it was not working as well as it used to. Surprise, surprise!

Someone called my teacher (who is also a consultant) for a network contract. The guy was complaining of endless timeout errors and slow performance, even though his network was small (25-30 computers) and had decent equipment. So my teacher showed up, and, to his great surprise, found that every cable (10baseT - cat5) had various numbers of knots tied in each end. Not small, loose knots but real tight ones. Some of the cables had over 20 knots in them. The boss explained that the guy who wired the network (who was unreachable) made knots in the cables so he could identify them. The first PC had the cable with one knot at each end; the second PC's cable had two knots at each end, and so on. Not bad for the first PCs, but the cable for the 20th PC, with a total of forty knots in it, wasn't in very good shape.

Hadn't this guy ever heard of a marker? Or stickers?

I got a call from a woman whose system was displaying hardware errors. She said that this was related to a call they made a month ago. I researched the call she mentioned. Both calls were regarding massive hardware failure, but the error messages were different, and there was nothing else in common. I tried to call her back, but there was no answer. Three hours later, she called me. There were different errors now, and some of the supercomputers weren't working at all. I promised to contact a hardware specialist immediately.

That's the only time I ever let out a bloodcurdling scream in public. And she still refused to turn off the computers!

While working as the UNIX support for a major computer distribution company, I had more fun with the people in the warehouse then should be allowed. My pager went off with the message, "Program is down." I called to the warehouse lead, and the following ensued:

As we entered the warehouse I saw the problem before we even get to the bay itself. The bay was gone. I don't mean missing, I mean destroyed. The printers were in pieces all over the floor, the table was spread out about twelve feet, and the Wyse terminal was hanging from one of the blades of a fork lift.

I looked at the guy incredulously, but he was perfectly straight-faced. He wanted me to fix a bay they ran over with a construction vehicle.

  1. Index
  2. Literature
  3. Tech Support Humour
  4. Hardware Abuse