Fscking smokers.

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

I HATE servicing machines that belong to smokers.  There's a think film of tar over all the interior surfaces, and they absolutely REEK. Gives me a helluva headache.

I could seriously see firebombing every tobacco field on the planet.

Comments

[alcoholiday.livejournal.com]

What the f, who smokes near their computer? Yes, I smoke... outside on my frickin patio.

[alcoholiday.livejournal.com]

My ex's mom smoked at her computer, and it was all yellow and I'm sure the inside was caked with tobacco film. And stuck chewed Nicoderm to it as well.. ugh god.

I can't even fathom smoking inside the house. I am a smoker with a guilty conscience, ha.

[anivair.livejournal.com]

Did she chew nicoderm while smoking? that would be the best!

I got a system a few months ago that I had to clean and it was caked with ... we'll just say stray human fluids. Specifically male human fluids. I had to go buy rubber gloves and a brush just to clean it.

It had the virtual jenna jameson in it as well as a virtual pot growing program.

He doesn't work here anymore.

[alcoholiday.livejournal.com]

Jesus!

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

It was someone's *production work machine*?! Ugh ..

[meijhen.livejournal.com]

puts a whole new spin on "production" doesn't it?

Eewwwwwwww

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

It had the virtual jenna jameson in it

I was not familiar with this until your post.

I am in the wrong business.

[cjkline83.livejournal.com]

I smoke near my computer. The side is off, and I don't give a fuck. I'm trying to slowly kill it so I have a reason to buy a new one.

[yanni85.livejournal.com]

As long as you aren't ever going to send it to anyone else, what you do to your own computer is your business. However, remind me not to visit your house.

[awarrenfells.livejournal.com]

Maybe they are trying to put the smoke back in...
... Once you let the smoke out of the computer, it stops working. XD

[awarrenfells.livejournal.com]

Hehehe. Isn't it though? ^_^

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

I used to repair CRT monitors. Nothing on earth attracts the noxious cigarette smoke residues like the area around the secondary anode terminal of a CRT. ::nausea::

Agreed, that stuff should legally be considered hazmat, and there should be an outrageous surcharge for having to work on machines contaminated with it. Especially if it's thick enough to cause actual failures like the optical drive not reading/writing (because of the accumulation of gunk on the lens) or soft shorts on the logic board .. those by all rights should be considered abuse/accidental damage and not covered under warranty. The "smokers rights" groups would naturally raise a stink over it, but hey .. smoking contaminates computer parts and can do real damage if it's heavy enough, cry me a fscking river. No sympathy.

(There's justification for treating that crap as hazmat, too .. it's toxic as hell and it's not good for you to breathe it, let alone get it on your skin. Seriously, invest in some good latex gloves and a mask, and if possible, some good ventilation equipment..)

[jecook]

When I was at the serviceCo, we have a machine come in for extended warranty depot work. When we described that the entire machine had been killed from the thick, black layer of tar on every interior surface of that machine, the warranty co. said "That's abuse, we ain't covering it", and we agreed with them. the entire shop stank like and ashtray for entire duration that machine was in there, and the poor bastard that had to work on it went through many pairs of gloves and at least a bottle of the industrial grade cleaning chemicals we use trying to clean the thing up.

We found out that the machine lived in a house full of carton+ /day chain smokers. Gross.

[soldierx.livejournal.com]

Been there before got the t-shirt. People who smoke really need to learn to smoke as far away as possible from the computer. Its always fun to scrape the nicotine off the inside of a computer case and the components, not. Fire bomb away on the tobacco fields, it would save my dad a couple $100,000 a year since my mom smokes like a chimney.

[bitterfun.livejournal.com]

"I could seriously see firebombing every tobacco field on the planet."

This just in, rampant cases of second-hand smoke cancer discovered in towns surrounding firebombed tabacco fields. Eco-terrorist wanted in conjunction with poisoning farming communities.


But seriously, I can't talk about the details but I was contracted in the discovery process of a certain US vs RJR(big tobacco company) case. I had to dig up 15 years of R&D and Marketing emails. We had to read the some of the emails as part of the QA work.

I no longer smoke.

[gholam.livejournal.com]

Smokers' machines have nothing on industrial PCs with a mix of oil residue, dust and metallic particles all over their insides...

[toxico.livejournal.com]

Someone once posted a before-and-after of a PC in a machine shop that he blew out using their pressure hose. I've been meaning to find it but damn that's a lot of material to look through.

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

Yeah.

Worst case of this I ever encountered was a CRT monitor from an old Perkin-Elmer 8500 that had lived in an analysis shack out in an oilpatch out in West Texas, where the techs all smoked like chimneys *and* brought in drilling mud dust and metal chips on their clothing from getting samples at the wellhead. The muck was so thick around the anode cap that I had to follow the anode wire up from the flyback to even *find the cap*, and when I got it all cleaned out, the HV was arcing to ground across the film that was left behind. I had to alcohol wash the area around the anode and paint it with glyptal to get it to stop flashing over. And I was sick as a dog for about two weeks after that.

(And the guys who sent it in to us to be fixed were complete dicks about it when one of us suggested that maybe smoking in the lab wasn't the best thing for their equipment. Which didn't surprise me much, but I did make damn sure they knew that there was no warranty on the repairs I did, because I was pretty sure it would come back again..)

[ex-deliveryboy.livejournal.com]

[grayhawkfh.livejournal.com]

Heh. Smokes, gin (I think, to the right), and Pepcid...

If I was allowed the smokes and gin at work...that might be about right some days..

[ex-deliveryboy.livejournal.com]

my old roommate's keyboard and system didn't look as bad as that, but was pretty close.

It kept overheating, so he took everything out of the case and taped it all to a white board.

[preserver3.livejournal.com]

Notice how the mouse looks relatively clean?

I'd be willing to bet that it's much newer than the keyboard, because whether you have a "gumball" mouse or a laser mouse, Tobacco Tar Kills mice--dead,

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

That's just wrong. At least use an ashtray.

[xforge.livejournal.com]

::hair turns snowy white::

Wait, too late

You can have my Arturo Fuente Brevas when you pry them out of my cold, dead, tobacco-smelling hands.

(Actually I smoke about 1 every 18 months, but I'd miss them horribly.)

[xforge.livejournal.com]

A buddy of mine just won an award (like, runner-up) for making an anti-smoking commercial on YouTube based on the crud that builds up in the TV sets of smokers. He's an electronic tech and has to open them up every day. ::shudder:: They're pretty horrific.

In fact:

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

He is absolutely right. (Good shot of dendritic smoke residue accumulation around the secondary anode cap and the anode wire .. ugh .. only thing missing is the *smell*! And that flyback so encrusted with residue it's barely recognizable .. :& ..) It's hard for me to watch him rubbing his finger in that stuff .. I've opened up monitors almost that bad and I didn't even want to touch the CRT or any of the HV circuits.

Dust is one thing (and it does tend to form dendrites around the HV parts) .. smoke residue is something entirely different ..

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

Which is why the ionic breeze doesn't work so well. Once the charged surfaces get covered, it tends to stop circulating oxygen. Much like your lungs.

Black lung specials are one thing... but then there are the PCs full of roaches, or mold, or mouse droppings, or bird droppings (wha...how???) and/or tomcat piss (almost always a total loss from corrosion).

[agmlego.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear. I would be OK with smoking iff the only one affected by it was the smoker...as it stands, I do not have the benefit of the filter that they do, so I am against it.

--
"Memento Mori Ergo Carpe Diem"

[yanni85.livejournal.com]

Heartily seconded.

[sean-langley.livejournal.com]

I fail to understand how many of these computers smokers bring in to our shop still WORK. I don't smoke, no smoking allowed anywhere near my place, I clean methodically and use good air filters and my computers are still filled with dustballs that eventually stop them from working.

I can't imagine how a smoker's computer just doesn't kill itself. Then again maybe thats why we see them so often for repair...

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

Smoke residue actually is slightly electrically conductive, and a thick enough accumulation will soft-short unprotected traces and solder pads just enough to make the machine twitchy. It's mostly attracted to high electric field gradients like you'd find in the power supply, though, so most of it tends to wind up inside the PS casing. But I've seen motherboards/main logic boards pretty thoroughly coated in it, to the extent that it was triggering occasional kernel panics and hard freezes.

It will also coat the optical drive lens with enough of a film that it will eventually stop reading/writing reliably by scattering the beam. And I'm actually thankful most machines I work with no longer have floppy drives, because you don't even want to KNOW what it does to those.

And if it's thick enough, it will block airflow through the fins on CPU heat sinks and cause the processors to overheat and fail.

I firmly believe smokers' machines do fail at a statistically measurably higher rate than those used in a smoke-free environment. Most of the newer LCD-based machines at least don't have the multi-kilovolt anode and focus grid supplies to attract even more of the crud, but heavy enough accumulations will, absolutely guaranteed, produce higher failure rates. Like I said, i consider it abuse/accidental damage and, if it were up to me, would not cover any repairs for a smoke-exposed machine that weren't *painfully obviously* due to defects in materials/workmanship, and I would bill them for a hazmat surcharge for exposing the techs to that residue. Every place that works on computers really should follow those procedures. They don't, because the industry has evolved to give smokers a free ride on the damage they do. But the damage definitely exists.

[jecook]

For the record, kitchen grease does the *same* exact thing- and it's about as gross.

There's a *reason* why I implore the techs to use the vaccuum cleaner on the POS machines that are submitted to the build room for cleaning...

[meijhen.livejournal.com]

My husband smoked in his apartment before he moved in with me. Because he was a gamer, he'd go through about 4 packs a day, leaving them to burn out in the ashtray (right next to the computer!).
I made him take 409 to the outside of the case, the monitor, and anything it was even remotely safe to use it on, and clean the interior thoroughly before he was allowed to bring it into my house.

I made him throw out his sheets and towels -- the smell wouldn't come out after three washings. And his furniture went into storage so it could air out for three years before it came into the house.

It was horrible.

Thank goodness we've both quit.

[ravan.livejournal.com]

One of the people I support in my off time owns a tobacco shop. He puts all his business records on the computer in his shop. I'm working on getting him to a) do regular backups, and b) regularly blow out his machine of the dust and ash.

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

I've tried canned air and it doesn't budge more than the dendrites .. the film sticks to the surface like tar and has to be *scrubbed* to get it off. (And I won't blow out the airborne dendrites inside, they're pure hell on lungs.) I remember trying some sort of perfluorocarbon cleaning spray* on PC boards exposed to it, but I can't remember if it got all of it off or not. And I'm not sure what those sprays do to modern high density SMD boards, pretty sure everything on those is sealed, but wouldn't swear to it.

(*NOT contact cleaner, which has a contact lubricant in it .. straight CFC-14 or Fluorinert, which doesn't leave anything behind but condensation since it slightly chills the part as it evaporates.)

[ravan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, canned air won't get the tar, but his is also dust and ash (cigar smoker), and by getting rid of that he grants his system a little more life. He's non-technical, so I don't want to have him trying to buy pro grade cleaners.

Now, when I go the 90 miles to service his gear, I might try the good stuff.

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

At least they don't make computers out of beige plastic anymore. You could always tell a heavy smoker because their computer would be stained yellow. If it does that to an inanimate object just being exposed to the second hand smoke, you can only imagine what it's doing to the lungs of the person actually inhaling the stuff.

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

Heh. We used to get old style CRT iMacs in with the yellow tint to all the clear plastics on the housing. We called them CancerMacs.

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Five little words you might want to consider...
Genetically. Modified. Tobacco. Mosaic. Virus.

Google it.

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but fire is so much more fun.

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

I had a roomie who used to use my computer for IRC for six or seven hours a day (to the point where I could never use it) and she would smoke the entire time. My poor computer was getting so dirty.

So one day when she was out I set a BIOS password on it, so the next time she turned it on all she saw was

--->_

I never saw her on the computer again, and she never asked for the password. Evidently she thought she'd broken the computer and didn't want to bring it up.

[kenbrody.livejournal.com]

I guess you've never had the "pleasure" (FSVO) of servicing a computer from a taxi dispatcher's office? Tiny room. Plenty of smokers (plural!). Hasn't been services in $DEITY knows how long.

We had to open it outside and leave it there for a day before bringing it inside to work on it.

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

Oh hell no. I havent done onsite service since I got out of CompUSSR, and I will not do it again ever under any circumstances.

[kenbrody.livejournal.com]

Who said anything about on-site? This was a computer brought into our shop for cleaning. (It came in for virus/spyware cleaning. It got more than just that.)