Do not touch that computer. Not even while wearing gloves. It is a biohazard It's a holiday Friday in much of the Reg-reading world so On Call is departing from its usual format of a single story to instead bring you more tales from our Dirt File: your stories of mud, crud, dust, fust, and other foul substances that make fixing hardware so very fun. Let's start with a reader we'll Regomize as "Bill" …
Correct response though, full marks, to the person who sent the tar-box back as a biohazard. Some jobs are inherently dangerous, but not that one.
"Sorry sir, the carcinogens that broke your Apple box are yours, because you put them there. You'll have to remove them before I can do anything to help you."
Workplace Edvard Munch moments can be fun in retrospect, and how we deal with them makes them more so.
With a previous work hat on I've seen one of those - the thing was different shades of brown on the outside, dark brown ion the bits that started off as black, and lighter brown on the bits that had started life as white or beige. Inside was as the article describes. Fortunately, it didn't come to my desk - I would have refused to tough it.
And the ironic part - this belonged to an environmental campaigner campaigning against nuclear in the area because of the cancer risk (see icon).
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!
Mid 1980s and Commodore Pet was the machine of the day in my area. Armed with Raeto West's invaluable manual and a little 6502 assembler knowledge it was relatively easy to control external bits of kit using IEEE488 (aka GPIB) low level - TALK, UNTALK, LISTEN, UNLISTEN - commands. My tour de force was to link two Commodore Pets, each with its own IEE488 controller, using 6502 assembler
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.
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.
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.
There is a brilliant video of Richard Hammond sitting in a car while it was being hit by simulated lightning strikes. The Car died because the lighting destroyed the electronics but inside the car, Richard was fine . also Airplanes are regularly struck by lightning.
Yep, the tyres that are black because the rubber has lots of carbon in it, and have steel belts for reinforcing.
One place you do _not_ stand in a thunderstorm is anywhere near a large truck in an open cut mine. If/when lightning hits those tyres can explode and gut you. It's common enough that mine safety bods put out alerts: https://www.rshq.qld.gov.au/safety-notices/mines/lightning-strikes-on-rubber-tyred-vehicles
You can also get tyres which will emit coloured smoke during a burnout, which is pointless but cool.
The min safe distance from a power line in open dry air is the thickness of the insulator on the pole. In higher voltages, you don't have to come in contact with the wire to be killed. If it is either wet or on the ground, you need to be further away. And there is enough voltage difference from a downed high voltage line on the ground to pass thru you and kill you as you step towards or away from the wire as it passes from one foot to the other.
Sometimes safe distances are higher than that.
I have treated a man for electrical injuries who was working on an 11kV power pole on a drizzly day, after a dust storm the day before. Leaning against the wood of the pole was enough for him to complete the circuit with the layer of electrically conductive mineral mud that now coated the outside of the pole. He was standing on the ground, easily 10m from the conductors.
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.
It isn't just the Underground, it's London in general. I spend some time working Mon-Fri there and heading back to the north of England on Friday evenings.
The stuff coming out of my nose was just beginning to clear when I had to head south again on Sunday evening.
One place I supported was in Whitehall. If ever I needed to open up a PC case, the procedure was to unplug it and head out to the balcony. Make sure you are upwind before opening the cover. This was in an office where no-one smoked!
It isn't just the Underground, it's London in general.
I remember a training course in London years ago, where I spent the day in the centre but stayed in slightly greener suburbs. Each evening I'd get back to the hotel and think "ah, fresh air at last". Then I got off the plane home in Belfast (Aldergrove, way out in the country) and remembered what fresh air was really like.
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.
>paid duty on the product
That's surprising. The one time I worked for a drinks manufacturer, duty was only paid once the product was bottled, packaged and in a bonded warehouse. That way you don't pay taxes on the considerable waste element. I suspect it also makes it easier to manage different rates for those bottles to be exported.
... 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 ...
Corrosive air can elude the thought processes of the unwary ... In the mid-80s, I was working for a company that built gear to dynamically allocate bandwidth between voice and data.
Incredibly Big Monster of a company started getting weird bit errors on their global T1 (E1, T3 etc ... ) network. I was assigned to track down the problem after lower level techs couldn't figure it out.
Going thru' the data, I discovered that once the problem started occurring at any one site, it gradually became worse ... It was never bad enough to actually take down a connection, but network errors ramped up over time.
Further review showed that the same team of installers had installed the gear at all the sites with the problem.
I flew out to Boca Raton and discovered that they had installed punch-down blocks in a janitor's closet ... directly over a mop bucket full of ammonia water. Seems it was the only wall space that was unused almost universally in such spaces.
Blocks relocated and corroded wire replaced, no more bit-errors ... Rather than a "thank you", I got the task of updating the installation documentation. Naturally.
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.
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!
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...
Had a similar near miss last month, site we were working on (refurb of a large 4 bed house), the builder was happily cutting through a brick wall with a petrol stihl saw... i managed to get him to stop and showed him his cut line on the other side of the wall... inches from the lead sheathed main 415v incoming service cable. He'd misread the plans lol
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.
I worked in commercial radio in small market stations around the US in the late 1960s through the 1970s, back when indoor smoking was still allowed.
A lot of the jocks were smokers, some of them serious chain smokers, and even with halfway decent air conditioning (which wasn't always assured in some of the stations in which I worked) the smoke residue and ash would get into everything. Since there was not a touchscreen in sight, them not having been invented at the time, we had real physical switches and potentiometers and the ash, especially, would accelerate the wearing out of contacts and make the pots (volume controls) scratchy.
One station's chief engineer solution was to sometimes remove a piece of gear, take it out to the local self-serve car wash, hose it down thoroughly with the high pressure hose, then leave it in the sun for a few hours to dry out, and pop it back into the rack. Hard to do that with a complete audio console, though.
A few years prior, when I as in college, some family friends gave me a used car.
The problem was that they were both chain smokers, unfiltered Luckies, to boot, and the tar and crud took me months to clean out of the interior and it still reeked. I have no idea how many years breathing that off-gassing took off my life but I suspect I'll find out relatively soon.
We rented a unit that had previously housed an unrepentent indoor chain smoker. We had to take down and wash all the curtains, wash all the walls with Triclenium and have the carpets shampooed 3 times before we could move in. I still got a whiff of cigarette tar when we opened unused cupboards.
Quite possibly it's dental stone - plaster of Paris used to make casts.
I used to get 25kg bags of that from a dental supplier in Belfast to be made up into 1lb bags for SOCO to make casts of footprints & tyre marks. The supplier decided to add a 2nd line of business - video store, back in the days of VHS. It made a strange contrast, his shop full of videos and his dental display item - an old dentist's chair complete with a pedal-driven drill.
I reckoned that rather than have the SOCO's add a bucked and stirring stick to their kit it was easier to make the bags big enough and tell them to add a pint of water and mix them in the bag by squeezing it a few times. I wish I'd patented the idea - a few years ago I came across bags of mortar or concrete mix in M&Q with hose attachments to add water for in-bag mixing.
Not once have I ever refused to service a smoker's computer. Fans get replaced, boards go in the ultrasonic, screens are cleaned with alcohol, when I'm done there might be a vague hint of a smell that it's been smoked around, but there's no visible trace once I'm done. I've cleaned parts enough that I could even send them back to Apple as warranty/AppleCare replacements, sometimes with painted liquid contact indicators, because I liked being nicer to customers than Apple wanted me to be, a little white paint and it's not red any more, visible corrosion removed and they can't tell until it's well into the refurb process and too late to come back on us.
Sure, it's annoying. But it's how we kept good customers for decades. They're all dead now, and pretty much nobody smokes around computers any more.
I would have. Even back in the 90s most if not all of the people I knew who smoked never did so inside their own home, and outside of bars and casinos no workplace allowed smoking. So unless these tales are from the earliest days of the "PC" (i.e. green screen terminal) or some backwards country that still allowed smoking inside offices that recently I'm not sure where these PCs would have even come from.
But needless to say, there would have been plenty of other customers who didn't turn their computers into a biohazard so you wouldn't have been short of work refusing to work on the tarcicle computers!
Ever been to Japan? Over there it is illegal to smoke *in* *public*, people smoke indoors in shops and bars, etc. So all the service and till equipment, etc., is caked in smoking residue. One bar I went to I almost threw up within a few feet of entering, I had to turn around and stride straight back out.
Try one of those antique brick buildings, organically grown around heavy machinery in a wool processing plant.
Rough clean, combing, fine clean, second combing. Whats permeating air, walls and possibly souls is a fine, greasy and hairy sort-of-dust made from (hellish) particles of wool, all sorts of dirt and the natural grease in the sheeps wool that "nicely" glues this together. Sunlight reveals the floating nastiness and in the whole perimeter of said plant with reduced density as you leave it, any cooler surface will soon get mucky and somewhat "woolish", sticky and smelly.
3 Phase motors literally covered in some fur-like substance, baked rock hard by the motors coils that begin to burn to death with accumulating unwanted wool particle insulation. The fan blades on the motor axis had to be changed from aluminium to plastic, just to delay the inevitable demise of the motors a bit longer as metal blades tend to stop the motor axis as soon as the wooldust buildup in the motor cover becomes too much to flail through while plastic blades simply break off, letting the motors anguish go on for about a week longer.
Now for their computers...
Same here. Death by dust. After a few months, however, the air pressure system from the PLC cabinets was copied over to every expensive computer. Such air pressure systems are used in really dusty environments, pumping electrical cabinets with rubber fittings with cleaned pressurized air at around 0,5 bar above the environment. We used a reduced pressure of about 0,2 bar to supply the computer cases after modifying them for their new role. Power supply fan hole was now the only exhaust port for the computer but you still needed to clean them out every few months although it should have been impossible for any particle to crawl in.
I dont know if androids dream of electric sheep but sheep wool particles are the stuff for electronic nightmares.
Should i ever be in need, i would prefer paying a bit for cleaned and processed lanolin instead of the raw, smelly and dirty substance.
Pretty much like that expensive sort of coffee where the beans are digested by some feline creature, then pooped out, THEN processed and brewed.Going all nature seems fine when talking about it but getting ones hands dirty is quite a different thing. Much more so if contact with such substances is unvoluntary, yet unavoideable.
I could (throw) up the ante with some tales about the state of machinery at a company that produces pet food. Well known dog food brands are produced there and the muckmanure armor thats covering the motors in that facility is of such a "quality" that even a high power pressure cleaner ("Kärcher Dampfstrahler") needs several tries to get it off. In contrary to the aforementioned wool insulation, this stuff does not flake off in patches of different sizes but is some sort of super slime, tar like substance that sticks together and has to be shoved off layer by layer with the almost boiling pressurized water/detergent mixture.
The PLC cabinets near the production lines also tend to "grow" on you if you are dumb enough to touch them and despite another case of pressurized electrical cabinet you can see that the filth literally crawled in towards the warmth of the components, a little bit like solder following the iron.
After several unpleasant missions there, i insisted on installing remote service units for the PLCs so i could do my work in less contaminated environments.
"Kärcher" is simply the company name and "Dampfstrahler" is the product. Doesnt sound so hard in german.
I actually enjoy the brutish "pseudogerman" whenever i read or hear it. Its such a simple way to draw a picture of character of the respective individuum.
When it comes to movies, accents are often used like the eye colour and shape in anime. It just makes the roles easier to grasp, albeit quite cliché. Saber rider villain Jessy Blues edgy eyes compared to the pseudo austrian/german accent from some villains in "die hard" just add to the atmosphere.
Just beware of the deadly joke.
> "Kärcher" is simply the company name and "Dampfstrahler" is the product. Doesn't sound so hard in german.
Me, being German, can speak/pronounce that brand and product in a way that makes "Fritz, get ze Flammenwerfer" sound like playing with toys :D. Imagine it being pronounced like Rammstein's Till Lindemann combined with Heino would.
So the truck hitting 440V was lucky. At least in open pit mines, 440 is often "low voltage".
I know a telco guy who had a barn story. Back in the "Ma Bell" days, he was dispatched to service a damaged extension in a barn. The barn was located on a small hobby farm that was more like a private zoo. I don't remember all of the animals they owned, but one was a black bear. The bear liked to hang out in the barn, and would hibernate there in the winter. The theory was that the ringing of the phone pissed off the bear while he was trying to hibernate, so he ripped it off the wall.
That service ticket got a write up in Ma Bell's internal newsletter.
Reading Bill's story I was reminded of the late british author, Angela Carter who, according to a biographer, was a chain smoker who, when working, would shut herself away, but apparently the smoke would pour out the door's keyhole.
Have to wonder whether this was her Mac? A national treasure - if not preserved for all time, well kippered. The Mac that is.;)
Some of my least-favorite calls were to remediate issues with a weighing-and-labeling scale having gone offline in the deli department of a big-box store. The usual cause was a corroded network jack under the deli case, Sometimes it was green corrosion on the jack and/or plug. Sometimes it was corroded wires on the punchdown side of the jack.
Access to the underneath of the deli case requires lying on the floor, removing the toe-kick plate, and reaching in to the area under the case where the grey slime ends up when they wash the floor. They pretend to seal the junction with the floor with silicone caulk, but it never adheres. It's always yucky down there.
We still have a laptop in our store room which is double-bagged and left with strict instructions not to open. Returned by a colleague whose unwell child vomited all over it and no-one fancied unpacking it to get it working again.
The worst culprit was the gentleman who returned his laptop which had stopped working after alerting it was overheating. My colleague opened the laptop to find it filled with sand which had clogged the fan and led to the overheating. Incidentally, the 10 month old laptop was filthy and covered in cigarette burns - a very poor state for a relatively new device.
The caller flatly denied any knowledge of why there was sand in the laptop, went as far as to claim we put it there then demanded a new, replacement laptop be issued immediately. After he was politely reminded of his duty to look after company assets and a suggestion we would need to get management involved he thankfully remembered that he had taken his laptop bag to the beach and that this *might* be where the sand had come from.
'Sandy' was sent away with a 3 year old loaner for his troubles and thankfully left the business within a year.
back as a one of my first IT jobs I worked in a warehouse as a refurbishment technician / computer repair technician for a company that bought tractor trailer loads of computer equipmentfrom companies who needed someone to manage the removal of the no longer in use equipment that was willing to pay them for it to take it off their hands. This was in the early 2000s for a time of frame reference before 9/11 happened.
One of the things our company did in addition to reselling equipment to other companies to refurbish and resell (the choicer bits), was that we would take decent used equipment that wasn't worth enough to make any money off by reselling to other companies, and having me refurbish the machines, reload a legal copy of Windows 95 or (98 SE depending on how old the equipment was), and then put it out in the front show room for sale.
We had a gentleman come in and buy one of the cheaper Windows 95 machines and a 56K dial up modem so he could get on the internet with it. About 2 months later he brought it back saying something was wrong. The machine stank to high heaven of cheap nasty smelling cigar smoke, and the case was coated in tar residue.
Before I did anything else I had to break out the bottle of black lightning degreaser spray to use to spray on the removed case cover to clean it up, then I had to remove the fan wearing rubber gloves and wipe it down with the same degreaser to remove as much of the stink and residue as I could. After that ordeal was done, I then set about working on the issues he was complaining about. The machine was infested with malware that was downloaded from the gay porn websites that were showing up in the history of the browser, I verified the guy didn't need to keep anything and wiped the machine clean and reloaded it again for him, and put some free antivirus on it and advised him to not pay any attention to any pop ups about needing to install software to properly view a site. The guy paid his bill and took the machine home.
You guessed it, about a month later it was back, stinking to high heavens again, covered in tar residue. The guy demands to know why his machine keeps getting messed up, without commenting on the choice of porn, I very carefully advised that the stuff I was removing appeared to be related to the adult web sites being visited on the computer. Guy turns red, begins saying that he has been letting his nephew use his computer, and it must have been him. It came back three more times for work, the last time was right before the company went out of business after dell killed the refurb market along with the U.S. economy slow down after 9/11 happened. That last time I got a potpourri sachet and zip tied it inside the case in front of the case fan, wiped the case down, didn't bother cleaning inside the case. I imagine the next tech he took it to got a good laugh about the efforts to make the computer smell better.
The guy was the butcher at our local Piggly Wiggly supermarket. So henceforth thereafter, whenever we were discussing him in the shop, he was known as the Piggly Wiggly porn guy.
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