I used to be a systems analyst supporting enterprise groupware deployments for a multi-national staffing company. Now I run a small PC repair business from an acreage located 28 km east of the Village of Consort in east central Alberta. It’s safe to say that I’ve seen just about everything in fifteen years of working with computers. Well, almost everything.
Tonight marks the first time I’ve ever had to remove a heat sink from a computer system and soak it in engine degreaser.
You’re not going to tell us the story that goes along with that?
How can you build us up like that and then not deliver?
…one small business client I went to in 1996 complained her machine kept shutting down after a bit. I figured either heat or virus.
Was heat alright, That telltale bakalite smell gave it away as soon one opens the case.
I have never seen in my 15 years of IT work (crap it’s been that long?) so much dust and cat hair in a computer.
The dust bunnies literally covered the RAM, NIC card and the CPU. I know what you mean about needing engine degreaser…sticky, gunk stuck to the heat sink.
People, please remember to at least once a year, take your machine outside and blow the dust out of it, more often if you have pets in the house/work place.
…Sean, maybe I’ll stop by sometime between my Calgary/Red Deer run.
…judging by the time stamp of the posting and the replies, seems like only us IT types are up right now…
I was a computer fixer in the mainframe day. There was much paper used in massive page printers and punch cards. Dust could be found in the system innards in piles.
I also had a situation where plugged filters were causing hard drive crashes. The culprit was diesel locomotives in the yard next door. You could see a black fringe in the building air difusers.
And yeh, I am a nightHawk too.
“You’re not going to tell us the story that goes along with that?”
The system is from a local machine shop. Machine shops apparently have a lot of grease in the air as this thing is crusted with a persistent oil and dust mixture.
I’ve been using a Water Pic loaded with Meythl Hydrate to blow scum off the mobo. The heat sink was plugged so badly that neither compressed air or the Water Pic could dislodge the solid mass between the fins. I had to pop it out and use a pocket knife to chisel out the crap and now I’m soaking it in degreaser.
I’m freakin’ amazed that the CPU on this thing isn’t cooked. By all rights it should be.
The other thing I’ve learned tonight is that whatever accumulated on this thing is corrosive as part of the heat sink fan blades have actually been eaten away. The fan is being replaced.
“seems like only us IT types are up right now…”
I’ve got no choice there. I got backed up on satellite installs during the cold snap so I’m out every day while it’s warm trying to whittle down the backlog. I spend the evening with my family and then head over to the office to work on whatever computers are piled up there after everyone is in bed. Five of these systems are going back to local businesses tomorrow morning. I pick them up at end of business on Friday and get them back at opening on Monday morning so they don’t lose use of the machines.
“Sean, maybe I’ll stop by sometime between my Calgary/Red Deer run.”
We’re nearly three hours drive east of Red Deer, but you’re welcome to drop in if you find yourself in the area as the coffee is always on. 🙂
Wrong Tomax7, us taxpreparers are also up at this time. No phone calls to interupt me.
At least the lady didn’t want the coffee cup thingamajiggy replaced. You guessed it, she used the cd holder for her coffee cup.
The funniest service incident I ever had as a tech was when I worked at Red Deer College. One of the instructors for a distance education program that I supported asked me if I would mind looking into a problem she was having that Computer Services hadn’t been able to nail down.
Her problem was that large splotches of random characters would appear in her documents and were slowing down her work. Several techs from Computer Services had been unable to replicate the problem.
I was in her office with her having a coffee when her phone rang. She leaned over to answer the phone and “boobed” the keyboard (the woman was ample). I had a helluva time trying to explain the nature of the malfunction to her in a tactful manner.
Now pictures would have been great 🙂
“…judging by the time stamp of the posting and the replies, seems like only us IT types are up right now…
Posted by: tomax7 at January 22, 2007 01:51 AM ”
roger on that mr max7 !!! LOL !!!
old habits hard to break, I cut my teeth on digital equipment and control data mainframes werkin fer peanuts on the nite shift.
it was fun playing the moon lander game all night till the time I had half a dozen going at the same time and they crashed the cyber 73 in the midst of a clients very expensive block time. I didnt tell them that part on the day shift.
then there was the time I accidentally dropped a DEC tape (small stubby magnetic tape media) right on top of the console toggle switches and crashed to pdp10 5 minutes before the end of the shift. uh oh. hmmm, what to do…. so I quickly hit the cpu continue switch, ah there it goes…. restarted the card reader program which was the one that had the cpu and got halted when the tape landed on the memory deposit toggle, then I casually moseyed over to the communications interface pdp 8, selected the ‘please resume’ message and got that back up and running and …. walked out of the room and went home, no one the wiser.
Sean:
Hmmmmm. From my days in support, I would’ve written down the ample-chested lady’s problem on the work order as a “PEBKAC” issue. (“Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.”)
Used PEBKAC far more often to describe a problem than you’d think…
OT but, it seems our msm is about to try to reinvent the OJ trial in BC. This trial is supposed to last a year, and will be fully covered by cbc and ctv. The fate of the missing women is sad, but how many families can go on tv and say, she was a wonderful person growing up etc. They want to know what happened.
Facts: wonderful women took a wrong turn somewhere in life and turned to the streets. These women went missing and some were found dead in a strange place. Horrible for the families. But, I would rather see all the hype, and money being spent covering this trial, focused on the women and girls still out there on the streets. Find out why they are there and help get them back to their loving families. I wonder if any of their former clients will show up, and how do they feel after all these years. Are they still out there picking up women, and do they feel any responsibility for being a little responsible for the murders.
Sean: Weird thing do happen when wires get crossed (for lack of better explanation). A supplier sold a disabled customer one of those beds that raise, lower, vibrate etc.
He had problems as it would raise, lower etc for no reason. After several trips to fix the problem, new control etc. He was stumped and offered to replace the bed. A chance stop for a cup of coffee and the problem was solved. Another customer was telling of strange things going on in his house. Seems his tv would go on and off, phone wouldn’t work and other things, so he had disconnected something. He was a next door neighbor and said the strange things had been going on for a week. Seems the remote controls for the bed and neighbors tv etc worked on each others equipment. Problem was solved, (I don’t know how,) but it was the subject of lots of laughs for a while.
Ha…you IT geeks today have it easy.
Before I finished my EEng. I worked for a national electronic field service company that did service contracts on everything from medical digital hardware to sevice contracts on name brand TVs. I got stuck with the commercial video contracts (yes in the days before flat panel LCD)…We had several contracts with local downtown hotels bars and Pizza joints that had the paleolithic projection TV systems ….3 eyed monsters with 3 lensed CRTs cranked up to the max brightness with 38KVDC charging the Hv anodes…the static field on these brontos was something to see…anyway, any ITs who worked with big monitors in the early days know what charge build up on a CRT does for attracting airbourne particulates …particularly if the CRT was monochrome and had no degaussing sheild ( like the 3 RGB CRTs on the Advents)…anyway these 3 picure tube wonder projectors were modified by our company to operate upside down and we then suspended them from the ceilings of these drinking establishments and mounted the separate srceens 6 feet away and high ( so the local inebriates could not damage the equipment).
I did many services on these restaurant and hotel projectors but the ones in the downtown beer dives I schedued once a year maintenance. This was also the days when bar patrons could smoke and in the beer dives the patrons probably went through a pack each in a 4 hr beer session…needless to say the magnetc fields on those old projector TVs attracted every molecule of tar expelled into the air and mixed it with the dust and pollen….in a year’s time the inside of these TVs had their 3 CRTS and PCBs caked with a thick coat of what appeared to be molasses…prety much all perfomance failure calls were related to one heat-sinked component or another over heating because of the dripping dose of tar it recived curtosey of patrons who smoked like chimneys.
On my regular maintainence of these beer dive units I’d just pop the case exposing all the guts, then, beneath the projector I spread 4 layers of newspaper…then I shinneyed back up the ladder with a can of heavy duty industrial electronic solvent-degreaser in each hand and hosed that bronto down as I watched the black rain fall of dissolved tar and nicotine shower down onto the papers totally saturating them in the black gunk ( I wore gloves,glasses, painter’s mask)…..then I did restorative adjustmets , buttoned it up and blew outta there for another year…the other projector techs wondered why I never got any breakdown calls from those bars and why I always expensed a case of MG solvent when I did the 3 beer dive projectors. 😉
Other than that the worst mess I ever saw was where the customer’s kid but a bunch of crayons on top of his Daddy’s Macintosh analogue stereo amp system (old discreet tube job threw a lot of heat) and they melted into the chassis causing huge billows of smoke evey time he played his stereo…degreaser again along with Q-tips and a bill for 2 hrs bench service…I told the guy he had to stop playing Metallica …it was frying his transformers 😉
The machineshop story reminds me of the job interview I went to at this company that serviced snowplows. The job was to fabricate and maintain a custom electronics controller that controlled the plow blades. With great pride the interviewer showed me where I would work: a bench in the garage between the hydraulic bench and the welding bay! Oh yeah, I was also to be trained on hydraulics so I could be used when I wasn’t doing that “electrical stuff”. I think making coffee was also part of the job description too.
The real pros used degreasing vapour tanks filled with Ozone killing and carcinogenic hydro flourocarbons…. trichlorethene I recall…can’t even buy the stuff now.
As these vapour cleaners became unobtainable we migrated to distilled water or industrial purity alcohol in ultrasonic baths ….non mechanical pieces are NOT harmed by either … all you have to do is Dry them Out properly before reassembling.
look at all the tekkies on this thread.
and to think that the liberal crowd thought this blog was populated by beer swilling, red neck izzy money types.
well it is!
…this customer phoned in and said her printer wasn’t working…i asked what operating system she used, “huh what”? she said, so I said “is it running Windows?, “No she said, it is near the door way”.
Love that urban legend…still laugh over it. Same with the boxes…pack it up, yer too stupid to own a computer…
Got more on my site:
http://www.tomax7.com/comedy.html#computer
Heh, Sean, gonna ask Rita in ConEd about the big busted lady – when were you at RDC? I teach up there every other month.
One poor student was learning how to format c: and I was walking by and yelled “WHAT ARE YOU DOING???”…poor thing nearly hit the ceiling and wet herself.
After she learned to talk again, we had a good laugh, and became my star student and wasn’t afraid of computers any more. Did that to another student in Edmonton (Norquest) but he’s lost his fear of computers too, got a nice email he sent at the end of the course how he learned to relax around computer after that incident.
I’m so mean.
Speaking of relaxing, yah, I’ve busted enough keyboards (like that guy in the video)- one I remember from a few years ago like it was yesterday.
Installing Novell 5 on a server, kept beeping and crapping out over 3Com NIC card strings then something else…finally at 3am, I lost it.
Still finding little pieces of plastic keys in that office…
“Heh, Sean, gonna ask Rita in ConEd about the big busted lady – when were you at RDC? I teach up there every other month.”
I was there in 1999/2000. Got offered a big money job at a dot com in Edmonton in the summer of 2000 that I never should have taken. What a nightmare that was.
“Ha…you IT geeks today have it easy.”
Before RDC I worked for a small company that sold and supported distance education software and hardware. Key among our offerings were H.320 standards based videoconferencing systems. This meant hauling around a lot of video equipment to demo for prospective customers.
There was one demonstration at a college in Saskatchewan that was booked into a room on the third floor. I had to haul two 32 inch televisions — by myself as the boss had a bad back — and the heaviest motherfrakking cabinet you could imagine up three flights of stairs by myself. The boss learned a few new words from me by the time I’d stowed everything back in the truck. After that Barry switched to 27″ televisions and was careful to make sure we never got booked into a non-ground floor room unless there was an elevator we could use.
I don’t miss that job, either.
This thread takes me back to my electronics tech days when I used to be responsible for maintaining a PDP-12 and some PDP-11’s. Now those were real machines that came with complete schematics and large enough that I didn’t feel like some sausage fingered klutz when it came down to repairing them. It was a real rush to trace signals through the machine and be able to cut out a defective TTL gate, solder in a new one and get the machine working again. I used to be horrified at DEC field service techs who would merely show up with a complete complement of boards for the defective machine and start swapping in boards until they occasionally got the thing working. The toughest problem I ran into was chasing down very bizarre bugs in an 11/34 system which always seemed to change whenever I’d pull the machine out of it’s cabinet to service it. Eventually I found a washer that had fallen into the rats nest of wire wrap that made up the Unibus and pulling that washer out was one of the most satisfying bits of computer servicing I’ve done.
Now I just service machines for fun; believe me, after a day of seeing nothing but worried well patients who will never get better it is far more satisfying to tear apart a computer and clean it as I get the feeling of having accomplished something. It’s fun hacking wetware, but hardware never gets as annoying as defective wetware does. My first medical office “service call” was when my receptionist told me she had problems loading the upgrade to the billing software from a 5 1/4″ floppy. When I took apart the machine later that evening, I have never seen as much dust accumulated in a computer and the floppy drive was absolutely full of dust and I couldn’t figure out how it might have worked at all a few months before. This was an 80386 system so there was no CPU fan. I’ve had newer systems fail in spectacular fashion with 2 motherboards catching fire from defective Taiwanese electrolytics and an Athlon processor that melted when the CPU fan seized up. This is my primary complaint now where one gets a CPU that dissipates 80+ W in 1 cm**2 of surface area and the fan appears to be a cheap afterthought. One day when I was cleaning CPU heatsinks I came across a fan that was seized up. No oil in the office, but lots of injectable testosterone (in oil) which worked just fine in that fan.
As far as why there are so many tech types on SDA, I suspect that it’s because, unlike moonbats, they actually have to deal with reality instead of some idealized fantasy.
And as far as hours go, ever since I started programming I’ve been fighting a night cycle which was triggered by the UofC computer access being easiest between 00:00 – 05:00 in 1970.