Drunk user blow-dried laptop after dog lifted its leg over the keyboard Welcome again to On-Call, our Friday re-telling of readers unforgettable on-the-job experiences. This week, meet “Jim” who once had a manager show up in the IT department and ask for a discreet chat in the colleague's office. When Jim arrived the manager “pushed his laptop bag towards me, whilst giving the bag the kind of …
He was perfectly right to dump the whole sorry mess. Being a manager does not entitle you to making a godawful mess and then expecting everyone else to clean up after you - except that, obviously, that does tend to happen quite a lot.
In any case, a melted keyboard is certainly to be interpreted as a dead laptop. Even without the aroma and hygiene issue, it was most likely dead as a doorknob anyway.
Once I had a work laptop (a Thinkpad) which, due to a mistaken movement which I very much regretted, some Coke spilled onto the keyboard. I immediately turned over the laptop and tried to shake all the liquid out, finishing the job with tissues to dry everything as best I could. The laptop continued working for the rest of the evening, seemingly without trouble. I backed up everything important before shutting down, just in case. Turns out in case was the case, and the laptop never started up again. I got a replacement with an admonishment to keep the Coke away from the keyboard and that was that.
So yeah, dog pee all over, no attempt to dry it up with paper towels and applying hair dryer until the keyboard melts ? That thing was completely dead. No use wasting time on it and so much for that moron's budget and "important files".
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>" solid variety of coke" like from a blast furnace?
Your dealer has ripped you off then, the clue is that it's much darker in appearance than the desired substance. However all is not lost as you could also then additionally snort iron ore, shove a lighted match up your nose and when you sneeze* with any luck you should obtain pig iron in the tissue which then can be used for any number of exciting projects or exchanged for cash at the local crap metal merchants.
*Do not not sneeze until after you have inserted lighted match as this requires the process to be restarted from scratch.
When presented with a similar situation, involving cat urine, I simply told the user to get the hard drive out themselves and I'd see what data I could recover from it, and they can bin the rest of it.
The look I gave them when they asked if they could borrow my screwdrivers...
"Urine's sterile, BTW" - right up to the point when it leaves the urethra. After spending the night in a nice, warm laptop keyboard, I should think that all the organisms in the accumulated dust would have multiplied very happily.
I agree about checking out the disc drive, though. At least see if the compartment is dry.
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Cat are just as bad; I like describing them as four legged two year olds with no concept of memory at times.
(seriously. one of the cats in my house is elderly, and when he gets offended by pretty much anything, he poops on the floor instead of the litter box. He at least pees in the box, which I'm thankful for.)
Handing over an unpleasant biohazard to a techie without the equipment or the pay to handle such is basically impolite, irresponsible and just plain stupid. I'm with the techie here; dump the bloody thing straight off and perhaps even feed it through a shredder if there's any chance of there being unencrypted data on the laptop.
I had to work on a laptop belonging to a French friend of mine, who had spilled coffee across the keyboard.
Fortunately she'd had the presence of mind to turn it off, and then leave it upside down straight away, so it was fine after I'd cleaned off some of the sticky keys (with isopropyl, works better than water). However, it did leave my room stinking of coffee, which might be ok for some of you, but I don't like coffee :(
"In any case, a melted keyboard is certainly to be interpreted as a dead laptop. Even without the aroma and hygiene issue, it was most likely dead as a doorknob anyway."
Amusing counterpoint: About four years ago a friend had a rather severe garage fire, hot enough that radiant heat melted plastic components off a clothes dryer that was on the other side of a drywall partition. Before the fire he'd been out in the garage poking around online, and had left his netbook out there. The netbook was not in the hottest part of the fire, but it was close enough that the case warped and the keys fell out when it was opened. He took the SSD out of it, put it into another netbook, and is still using it today.
Many years ago I was working on the weekend shift when someone spilt a can of Fanta on to the keyboard of the main system console of our production mainframe (keeping the banking system up for the weekend to allow people to withdraw money from "new fangled" ATMs).
We quickly turned the keyboard over and switched to the backup console. The mainframe kept running and the keyboard eventually dried out. It continued to work until the system was replaced. The only side effect was occasionally getting one's finger stuck in a bit of residue on the keys or a key sticking... They don't make keyboards like that any more...
They don't make keyboards like that any more...
They do not make fanta like that any more either. The fanta or coke of old was all sugar. It dried to a "crisp". It took time, but it happened (eventually). At that point you could just bash on the keys a bit and hoover it all up.
The obesity nectars of today do not dry - they all remain a sticky goo because it is nasty mix of sucrose and glucose/fructose. A keyboard of old will be as f*** as a modern one if it cops a cup of "become a Wall-E character" juice.
I had a SUN Type 5 keyboard that got literally soked in coke (the liquid kind) twice. Once to the point that the entire thing was totally shorted out - the Caps Lock LED had an omnious glow.
Both times I simply took the thing apart, took out the controller board and cleaned it manually, and gave the keyboard itself a good shower.
Worked perfectly fine for many years after.
Dropped coffee in a brand new keyboard once. Ran it under the cold tap to the horror of all, then dismantled it and dried it with paper towel. The only sticky bit was the rubber sheet under the keycaps popped a couple of magnets and getting them back in place was tedious. Worked fine after for many years.
Why people think washing circuit boards is a terrible idea after they've been hosed in beverage is a mystery. Air drying is the mistake, as tap water is full of stuff that crystalizes out and can short tracks.
I've run HP's 90s era PS/2 keyboards through a dishwasher, and that cleans them up with no hassle and they work perfectly if you shake them out briskly after and give them a day or two to fully dry.
Anyone know of any USB keyboards made tough enough to do that? They are impossible to clean properly otherwise!
I've run HP's 90s era PS/2 keyboards through a dishwasher, and that cleans them up with no hassle and they work perfectly if you shake them out briskly after and give them a day or two to fully dry.
If I recall correctly, a lot of PS/2 computers could probably survive a trip through the dishwasher.
"Why people think washing circuit boards is a terrible idea after they've been hosed in beverage is a mystery. "
I hosed out an HP Officejet once after some dipstick left it stored upside down in a box. Ink everywhere. But lovely and sparkly clean afterwards. Drying it out took some time with a fan outside on a warm sunny day and re-lubing all the moving parts, but it worked a treat afterwards. Not recommended, but this was back when HP Officejet MFPs were still new on the market and quite expensive to replace.
"Many years ago I was working on the weekend shift when someone spilt a can of Fanta on to the keyboard of the main system console of our production mainframe (keeping the banking system up for the weekend to allow people to withdraw money from "new fangled" ATMs)."
Most places, it was a serious offence to have drinks or food anywhere near a system, least of all the system console of a mainframe. Actually spilling it and causing damage would likely be a sackable offence back then.
Nope, can honestly say if you are silly enough to keep a hairdryer on a keyboard for a length of time it will melt the keys. Seen it myself with someone that watched a you tube video on drying out a laptop. It's got to be a good length of time, but most cheap keyboards (and this one was a Toshiba) are very thin and melt pretty easily.
It doesn't take much. I warped the plastic case of a device once by putting it in a 170F oven to bake out some moisture that had gotten into it...170F isn't really that much, you can hold your hand in 170F air without much discomfort. (170F water will scald you badly, but that's because water is a much better heat transfer medium.)
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Perhaps what happened is the manager plugged in a blow dryer on his porch and laid it on down, and laid the laptop on its side facing the dryer. Then left it there like that for a while.
That sounds like the sort of thing I might do being 1) too lazy to stand there waving a blow dryer around 2) wanting to have the smell outside my house 3) wanting the blow dryer on a concrete surface so I don't have to worry about a fire. I wouldn't think about the possibility of melting the keys, but I guess if you had it set on 'high' heat and put it right next to the keyboard...
Realistically if that happened to me I'd pull out the battery and hard drive, then hold the laptop under the shower, shake it out real good and THEN blow dry the crap out of it and let it sit overnight. If that failed, as it probably would, I'd put it back together, take it to IT and say "my laptop quit working" and they'd be none the wiser :)
"Realistically if that happened to me I'd pull out the battery and hard drive, then hold the laptop under the shower,"
The manager concerned was pissed at the time. How pissed is another matter of course, but one tends to make not quite fully fully rational decisions after a few jars.
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