He did WHAT ON HIS LAPTOP?!
Posted by SquidwardSmellz@reddit | talesfromtechsupport | View on Reddit | 115 comments
I work as an IT tech for the largest school district in my city. I am in charge of two sites. This is just a funny story about my first ever ticket.
I had spent a couple weeks shadowing, learning the campuses, learning the ropes, until I was finally fed to the wolves and released to be on my own.
My first official day as campus IT, I open my tickets my first one reads
“Student threw up all over his laptop. It is in the sink in the back of the classroom”
Erm. What the fuck.
This was a few months ago, and if that isnt the perfect introduction to what working tech in public schools is like I don’t know what is.
I ended up getting an empty milk crate, got a picture of the asset tag and chucked it in the trash.
Dumbname25644@reddit
I work IT in a hospital. This is what we have gloves and PPE for. I wish I was allowed to toss out a vomited on laptop. But I have cleaned and put back out into the field at least a dozen vomit laptops in the 10 years I have been here.
Terrible_Shirt6018@reddit
HP makes "Health care edition" of some of their laptops. Supposed to be easy to sanitize. Don't know about vomit though...
SquidwardSmellz@reddit (OP)
Luckily it was an EOL chromebook anyway.
…and thats kinda gross lol
virtualadept@reddit
Never go dumpster diving at a hospital.
fatimus_prime@reddit
Is… is your username a Mage reference?
Also, love that xkcd strip.
virtualadept@reddit
It is indeed. :)
Same. It's become something of a touchstone for me.
fatimus_prime@reddit
Oh, MAN. I haven’t played anything White Wolf in… 18 years? Mage has to be more than 20, and that only a couple of times.
It’s just a decent way to interact with the world. I think I was a bit of a know-it-all when I was younger, and while I still like being correct more than I like most things, I’m learning the joy of sharing something with someone who’s unfamiliar with it.
Aaahahaha glad someone finally got that reference. Such a classic.
Have no fear… I is here.
virtualadept@reddit
Mage 20th Anniversary came out... let me see... the copyright date on it is 2015 so it's nearly 30 years old now.
I don't want to think about that right now...
That XKCD taught me to think more carefully about how I express things, for the better I hope.
Masterlitchuk001@reddit
Heh, way back in the mists of time OK I am old! The first real D&D DM I knew at our local wargaming club was Evil in a comedic way. I was 12 when I first joined the club.
He loved to give people with bad English skills a 'Wish'. The way a skilled 30-year librarian can twist the language for comedic effect was sure to teach you, to use better terminology and never to use loose terms.
I.e. I wish to be a millionaire. Now that was a classic. He forgot to add to keep forever and what type of currency as in Gold pieces. You can imagine the actual result...
DRUMS11@reddit
Never go dumpster diving at a hospital.
Where else am I supposed to find spare (body) parts?
^((Yes, I know body bits are properly disposed of, not put in the dumpster.))
matthewt@reddit
I would anticipate given the context that the people taking the laptops back out into the field will be pretty inured to vomit by their second year on the job if not sooner.
fatnino@reddit
My mom and my sister both had the original cheap Chromebook back when those were new.
My nephew stood on one and cracked the screen and spilled orange juice into the keyboard of the other one.
It's actually so easy to change screens on those things, I showed my mom a YouTube video of it and she did the swap herself.
Niewinnny@reddit
eyy, a donor laptop.
SavvySillybug@reddit
my toddler is a machine that turns laptops into donor laptops
nshire@reddit
How do you clean them? Rinsed off the boards?
K-o-R@reddit
Leave it on a bed and send the bed through the autoclave.
eragonawesome2@reddit
On the one hand, I'm pretty sure this wouldn't work... On the other hand though, I don't actually know how an autoclave works or how hot they get, I'm kinda curious whether there are any laptops out there that COULD go through an autoclave?
espositorpedo@reddit
Pressurized steam at high temperature. You tell me. 🙄
https://microbeonline.com/autoclave-principle-procedure-types-and-uses/
Mr_ToDo@reddit
Honestly I'm not sure.
Like the screen obviously not, but I guess it depends what the other materials actually are.
I know some cheap plastics don't even like boiling so 20% above that wouldn't be great. But I guess the important parts would probably survive.
Does anyone sell laptops with aluminum bodies and are there laptop mechanical keyboards that are made of high temperature materials?
I wonder if a screen could be insulated enough that it could survive too(I guess just the top part could be sealed and the panel not too close to the edge). It'd be a pretty interesting idea to sell a tough book style system that you can sanitize in a autoclave. Bound to be a market somewhere.
JasperJ@reddit
Almost all higher grade laptops have aluminium bodies. Starting with unibody MacBooks, basically anything Apple from the last decade and a half or so. And also anything priced like Apple, except for the ones using exotic shit like carbon fiber panels (Sony had those).
But none of those would really enjoy an autoclave, I suspect.
joe_lmr@reddit
put it in a bucket of that magic sawdust that janitors use to make vomit disappear
nshire@reddit
Not going to remove the stomach acid from the board though
Happy_Saru@reddit
So what just an alcohol clean and go?
georgecm12@reddit
This goes back to a year there was a really bad flu outbreak. Everyone was getting it at some point or another. We had a laptop dropped off in the IT office and we were told that it had water damage. It wasn't until one of our staff began working on it that the full explanation came through: the water was dumped on it to wash away vomit from someone who had the flu.
The staff member was NOT happy. At all. He scrubbed down very thoroughly, then gloved up, bagged up the laptop in a biohazard bag, chucked it into e-waste, bleached down the workspace... then called up the offending department and told them in no uncertain terms how unbelievably out of bounds that move was.
SquidwardSmellz@reddit (OP)
Why would anyone WANT it repaired??? “Heres your laptop, someone threw up on it!!” Ew?? How do they expect to sanitize the sick that had inevitably ended up under the keyboard/frame. I was told i am not trained nor authorized to deal with biohazards like that at ALL and to refuse to even touch it.
Dumbname25644@reddit
Open laptop up and remove battery. The rest of the laptop can now be cleaned in soapy water. Make sure you leave it to dry thoroughly before even thinking about reattaching the battery.
eragonawesome2@reddit
If anyone reads this and doesn't immediately recognize it's a joke, this is a joke, DO NOT DO THIS. This will permanently destroy your laptop in ways you might not find until a year later when it just suddenly shorts somewhere on the mother board and stops working.
Water, and particularly soapy water, contains a lot of ions. These are deposited on the board as the water evaporates, leaving behind a residue which is potentially conductive, but more often corrosive.
It is possible to wash a laptop with soap and water, YOU cannot do it unless you have the correct tools for the job. If you don't immediately know what those tools are, you are not equipped to use those tools. I am not going to enable people to accidentally destroy their laptops by listing any of the tools here, simply do not do this.
Ha-Funny-Boy@reddit
IMHO the only hing I would want from any PC, lap, desk or otherwise is the drive with all the data. Clone or copy it then throw it along with the hardware used to copy it and the original PC into a bio hazard unit .
Edoc006@reddit
Instructions unclear, currently bathing with lapt- message not sent
ssateneth@reddit
It's not a joke. I wash computer parts in hot soapy water all the time. I rinse them off, blow dry them off with compressed air (inb4 compress air carries electric charge) and stick them in the oven at about 90C for a few hours. No problems.
eragonawesome2@reddit
If that works for your use case, great. The average person should not try this.
Azranael@reddit
Ahhh, Reddit: the best place to argue that something can be done while blatantly ignoring if it should be done as a principal.
felix-c256@reddit
Standard procedure before you solder something on a laptop board using a hot air or infrared soldering station is to first remove any batteries and then put the boards in an oven for 12h to take out all the moisture that accumulated. Otherwise the boards will warp because of the moisture absorbed over time. So yeah, if you wash them and dry them in an oven, all the water evaporates. You just need to be careful to not go too high a temperature and cook the electrolytic capacitors.
GlibGluberoo@reddit
Use DI water, no ions to be left behind as residue
eragonawesome2@reddit
DI water picks up ions super fast though and can deposit them in bad places.
JasperJ@reddit
The trick is always to use more than one bath. Soapy water, then just water, very throughly, then rinse in DI water, then rinse in alcohol. And try to get as much moisture traps as possible off — meaning bare circuit boards without heat sinks, in particular. There is no reason whatsoever for that not to work. If it is a typically 400-600 dollar school Chromebook or similar, it is not, however, cost wffective.
Especially if the stomach acid has already been at it with inadequate immediate rinsing.
And you will probably need a new keyboard unit either way, but those are cheap.
eragonawesome2@reddit
Okay, I feel like people keep missing this part: yes, it IS POSSIBLE to use soap and water IF you know and understand the risks and their sources.
The AVERAGE PERSON should not, because they do not know what you and I know. Nor would they know how to troubleshoot the problems that cropped up afterwards, which I'm sure they would encounter
bleke_xyz@reddit
97% alcohol bath time
KuzuHaslama@reddit
water and electronics combination is always so scary to me(i know its mostly safe but i still cant) so i use a large bowl with IPA to dip my electronics in for similar cleaning jobs.
colajunkie@reddit
Then check this video:
https://youtu.be/SVuI-Fn27-U
Yes, that guy knows what he's doing, he's an extreme overclocker.
dustojnikhummer@reddit
Let me guess, Derbauer washing his sub zero motherboards in a dishwasher?
colajunkie@reddit
Of course!
But honestly I could also have linked the aftermath of Linus drenching his whole rack in coolant and only having minimal fallout. Nowadays hardware is surprisingly robust, as long as you don't put power through it when wet...
dustojnikhummer@reddit
I remember that. I mean it's a cool idea but I never liked the concept of watercooling, especially in a bloody server RACK where you probably have a UPS at the very bottom
Loading_M_@reddit
See, a smart design would be to put the ups at the top - that way the water can't get to it.
dustojnikhummer@reddit
Weight.
JasperJ@reddit
Weight is a challenge you can design for, but you probably need custom rack cabinet for that.
Highwanted@reddit
the problem is more that you need a small lift to get the ups above your head, unless you want to risk head injuries
JasperJ@reddit
“Having a small lift” seems like an easy design challenge — more of a purchase order than a design.
Chakkoty@reddit
Even better: submerge everything in pure mineral oil and watch it stay a crisp 25° C.
Lantami@reddit
Works great until you have to change a component
No-Mortgage-2077@reddit
Bro, I'm pretty sure that beer is worse for computer components than water is.
JaariAtmc@reddit
Whenever I go to the store, I'm always surprised by the whole shelf full of bottles of Isopropyl alcohol (IPA). It's almost as if people drink the stuff.
No-Mortgage-2077@reddit
Honestly, I've always abbreviated that to ISO(x%). So, the one I use to clean my kitchen would be ISO(70%), and the one I use to clean my bong would be ISO(99%).
JaariAtmc@reddit
Honestly I classify them as IPA(Merck) and IPA(Honeywell).
UnabashedVoice@reddit
I, too, have always shortened it to ISO; y'know, because ISOpropyl. You're the first person I've ever seen refer to it as IPA.
JasperJ@reddit
IPA is a pretty common abbrev in some circles. Not in others.
JaariAtmc@reddit
To be fair, I'm a chemist.
UnabashedVoice@reddit
Ah, we're from different worlds. I wanted to be a chemist before i found out how much math is involved. Kudos to you, don't die.
JaariAtmc@reddit
Haha, I'm an analytical chemist. It surprisingly doesn't involve a lot of math. The most mathy applications of chemistry would be chemical engineering. After that, you either love reaction mechanisms and go the organic chemistry way, or you hate them and go the analytical chemistry way.
UnabashedVoice@reddit
Do Merck and Honeywell isopropanol have different properties? Different SG maybe? Just wondering why the distinction.
JaariAtmc@reddit
Merck and Honeywell are different suppliers. It matters to some. There will be tiny differences, but not enough to affect almost any test performed.
UnabashedVoice@reddit
Thanks for the clarification, it's appreciated. I hadn't even thought of preference; my brain stopped at "maybe one brand is anhydrous and the other is an azeotrope"
enaK66@reddit
Now that I can understand. I usually just call it iso.
SCM52@reddit
Before the days of no-clean flux, PCBs were always washed after the wave soldere process during manufacturing.
UKYPayne@reddit
I prefer a Lager or Pilsner over IPA for this myself.
Agreeable_Wheel5295@reddit
I also prefer Loggers
enygma999@reddit
This is how to wreck keyboards: the water gets between the films in the keyboard, dries there, and sticks the films together. Congrats, all the keys are now being pressed permanently. (Source: someone tried it snd I had to diagnose the issue.)
JasperJ@reddit
Yeah, those keyboard films are the worst at liquids.
mercurygreen@reddit
Bring it back still open, leave it on the department heads desk while there's a discussion about "appropriate"
IAmFearTheFuzzy@reddit
At least you haven't found a used condom on the school bus
Paracosm26@reddit
I found one on a bus a few weeks ago. 😞
Tenzipper@reddit
Back in the dark ages, my friend used to repair beepers.
He always wore latex gloves while working on the beepers, because they came to him with a piece of paper describing the problem, folded and wrapped around the beeper, held with a rubber band.
I asked him about the gloves, he said, "Because when you unwrap the rubber band and paper, and set the beeper down to read the paper, it's too late to put gloves on when the paper says it 'got wet.' Which is somehow nicer than saying it fell in the toilet."
SquidwardSmellz@reddit (OP)
When we get chromebooks back for the summer, we have bed bugs crawling out of them
Tenzipper@reddit
Well, that beats piss or shit. I would much rather clean out a bucket of poo and piss with my bare hands than have bed bugs.
Immediate-Season-293@reddit
Yeah, fuck, the bacteria and shit in shit is way easier to kill that fucking bedbugs. God damn.
gamtosthegreat@reddit
"the shit in shit" is a new one.
Immediate-Season-293@reddit
After a user has touched it, just about anything is now shit.
zeus204013@reddit
Beepers/pagers was the only wireless receiver of (text) info until mobile phones and SMS... Very useful in those days.
Tenzipper@reddit
Hell, the ones I'm thinking of didn't even receive text, just numeric values, so you knew what phone number to call.
JasperJ@reddit
Really early ones didn’t have that either. They were basically just specialized radios that could receive a 1 or a 0.
Hi_Its_Salty@reddit
Is a beeper a pager or something else ?
JasperJ@reddit
One is by what it produces and the other is by what it receives.
LupercaniusAB@reddit
Oh man, I’m old.
Miles_Saintborough@reddit
They're the same.
Background_Room_1102@reddit
I used to work in a phone shop - 50/50 sales and repairs. Too many times i had customers (during covid) hand me a phone and say "it fell in water" and then get OFFENDED that i put gloves on before touching it. And then i'd ask them repeatedly, what kind of water? and eventually they would go ".........it fell in the toilet"
lesethx@reddit
Had one laptop years ago, the guy had some kind of cup of tobacco spit spill on his laptop. Didn't tell me what had happened until after I was holding it and turning it over. I sent the laptop to a local repair shop, but with the warning that I wasn't given, to see if they could do anything. They had another half working laptop of the same model (a Lenovo something) and managed to Frankenstein them together to get a working laptop again... which I think we gave back to the original person.
warlock415@reddit
I had one where the user had had a nosebleed and then sneezed while the laptop was open.
Starfury_42@reddit
At the end of my last job (they outsourced us) I was wiping computers to send back for recycling. HUNDREDS of them. I wore gloves because the laptops were so disgusting with caked on - well I don't want to know.
frito123@reddit
Back in the ancient days of Computer Land and the IBM XT, a friend of mine was working as a bench technician. He said this customer came in with this really disgusted look on his face carrying this computer with the cover off. After talking to the customer, it was determined that the customer's kid was home from school with the stomach flu. The computer owner was constantly changing things in the computer, so had a habit of running it with the cover off. Naturally, the kid vomited in the computer. My friend, the tech, took it out back, and thoroughly hosed it out, then let it dry completely. By some miracle, the darn thing worked.
JasperJ@reddit
An XT would not really have anything in it that would hate water damage very much, as long as things dried out afterwards. Even all the chips down to the memory were DIP instead of surface mount in those days, which means there’s a lot less opportunity for water to get trapped under the chips and not get out.
frito123@reddit
I know. I've been around so long I built XT clones for Bubba's Clone Emporium and Screen Door Repair. Heck, when I was studying a computer engineering technology program, my co-op job was repairing computers to the chip level for University of Cincinnati.
SquidwardSmellz@reddit (OP)
I have opened the back of a laptop to green fuzzies growing on the mb from spoiled milk
YankeeWalrus@reddit
In every sub that allows custom user flairs, you should set yours as "good"
SquidwardSmellz@reddit (OP)
Why
YankeeWalrus@reddit
Your username
SquidwardSmellz@reddit (OP)
Oh smart
cckk0@reddit
I remember getting an email that went to our entire department
"Sent customer back to queue, threw up over my laptop".
Never seen them in work again
k12-IT@reddit
I've worked in K12 for 15+ years. When we rolled out 1:1 devices we had the following in Chromebooks:
StoicJim@reddit
You couldn't pay me enough.
SquidwardSmellz@reddit (OP)
One of our network guys literally has one of his monitors set to watch for inappropriate content on student Chromebooks thruout the day. My man has seen some shit
Knotimpressed@reddit
Really!? I always assumed that no school IT department would be well funded enough to do that. Mine definitely wasn't, kids looked at all sorts of shit with horrific URLs all the time.
SquidwardSmellz@reddit (OP)
Well this network guy is technically the ONLY network guy so he cant always monitor it haha. In theory he has the screen up on one of his 3 monitors with 1,000 tabs open and hes the only one who can access all IDFs for all 12 sites so he almost never has time to watch it but when he does… lord have mercy
k12-IT@reddit
We'd pass that along to an administrator with that users password.
I just remembered! We had another kid need to get blocked because he was reading Victorian era "stories."
GeekBill@reddit
Maybe not as bad as vomit in the laptop, but then again ...
I was supe of the repair shop for a large agriculture college, in Texas. Got a call to pick up and fix a keyboard. Diagnosis was easy: Prof had sneezed and spewed his entire load of dip onto/into the keyboard.
Yeah, we tossed it.
fatimus_prime@reddit
Why the fuck did I decide to read this thread while eating lunch?
FauxReal@reddit
Wow throwing it away is SOP? Sounds expensive.
SquidwardSmellz@reddit (OP)
Chromebook was end of life anyway, luckily
Silentemrys@reddit
When I worked at an elementary school the most common thing I did was take apart Chromebooks and replace the screen or open up the case and remove a broken off headphone jack.
northrupthebandgeek@reddit
I would've hosed it down. It's already water-damaged, so it ain't like more water would make it worse.
dickcheney600@reddit
Well, at the thrift store I used to volunteer at, we did get a DVD/VCR combo that had a bunch of dead bugs in it. Needless to say it got recycled.
BrentNewland@reddit
Customer brought in a laptop claiming they spilt "meat sauce" on it. Didn't find out until they picked up and paid that it was vomit. That customer got a lifetime ban.
Meladoom2@reddit
Sometimes it's just...
"Hi!"
"What happened?"
"My internet stopped working"
"What did you do?"
"I CAME on the router. Ejaculated. With SEMEN. Like, SPERM. It's completely COVERED in it."
"Oh right, Kingdom Come hotline. Are you our king?"
*person chuckles and hangs up*
ITrCool@reddit
I managed the hardware workbench at a former employer. Corporation of 35k employees.
We kept a large stack of bio hazard bags because of stuff like this. Our setup with the manufacturer required we turn the old machine in for a replacement.
So…..ok then. Into the bio bag it went and off to them to deal with.
SapifhasF@reddit
Remembers me as I worked in Education, There is the real messy shit. I found salami in CD drives, bread in floppy drives and a lot other food inside of tech. IDK why kids have to share their lounch with PCs.
RememberCitadel@reddit
Aw, come on. You could have hosed it off, then sold it as "C" grade stock to one of those shitty tech recycling companies that cold call all the damn time. You know the ones that call you exactly a week later after you told them that you would let them know when you had enough stuff to make it worth their time.