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Aug. 20th, 2004 07:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chaobell posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
techrecoveryWe got an old-ish HP box in the other day. General checkup/cleanup, maybe a RAM upgrade, and by the way, it'd been sitting in the customer's garage for some months. Okay, no problem.
Took care of all the software-related bits--there weren't actually many software-related bits to take care of, really, as it ran beautifully. The modem was dead, though. I'll get back to that later. But a virus scan found nothing, and Ad-Aware only found a handful of cookies. Ran Windows Update on it, and life was good in that department.
Now, the hardware. There was a slot cover missing. This, too, will come into play in a moment.
I grabbed the screwdriver and removed the screw on the right. Then the top one. Then the one on the left.
As I loosened the screw on the left, some tiny ...things fell out of the space between the lip of the outer case and the metal behind it. At first, I thought they were little dead bugs.
Upon closer inspection, I sorely wished they had been bugs.
No. They were mouse shit. Mouse shit.
Before I touched the box again, I did two things:
1. Donned rubber gloves
2. Pointed flashlight through hole left by missing slot cover to check for furry things so I would not be surprised
That cursory inspection revealed no furry things present. However, it did reveal that furry things had once used this machine as a Porta-Potty.
Fortunately, everything was dry when the box came to me. I opened it up and scrubbed the floor of the case with lemony fresh wipey things, which cleaned up the dried pee and poo just fine, but couldn't touch the stains left by the pee.
Then I remembered the modem.
I pulled it...and sure enough, a dried puddle of mouse pee sat on top of it. When it was still fresh mouse pee, it had seeped into the PCI slot where the modem lived, and those pins were now a nice crusty green. Well, that explains why the modem doesn't work. Needless to say, the new modem went into another slot.
Extra half-hour nasty tax added to ticket.
Took care of all the software-related bits--there weren't actually many software-related bits to take care of, really, as it ran beautifully. The modem was dead, though. I'll get back to that later. But a virus scan found nothing, and Ad-Aware only found a handful of cookies. Ran Windows Update on it, and life was good in that department.
Now, the hardware. There was a slot cover missing. This, too, will come into play in a moment.
I grabbed the screwdriver and removed the screw on the right. Then the top one. Then the one on the left.
As I loosened the screw on the left, some tiny ...things fell out of the space between the lip of the outer case and the metal behind it. At first, I thought they were little dead bugs.
Upon closer inspection, I sorely wished they had been bugs.
No. They were mouse shit. Mouse shit.
Before I touched the box again, I did two things:
1. Donned rubber gloves
2. Pointed flashlight through hole left by missing slot cover to check for furry things so I would not be surprised
That cursory inspection revealed no furry things present. However, it did reveal that furry things had once used this machine as a Porta-Potty.
Fortunately, everything was dry when the box came to me. I opened it up and scrubbed the floor of the case with lemony fresh wipey things, which cleaned up the dried pee and poo just fine, but couldn't touch the stains left by the pee.
Then I remembered the modem.
I pulled it...and sure enough, a dried puddle of mouse pee sat on top of it. When it was still fresh mouse pee, it had seeped into the PCI slot where the modem lived, and those pins were now a nice crusty green. Well, that explains why the modem doesn't work. Needless to say, the new modem went into another slot.
Extra half-hour nasty tax added to ticket.
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Date: 2004-08-21 04:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-21 06:08 am (UTC)Bottle
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Date: 2004-08-21 07:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-22 07:23 pm (UTC)And I thought that pic of the box with the roaches and the goo was bad. This new mouse thing just raises the bar.
My level of respect for you just keeps increasing, especially since my tech job doesn't even come close to matching the ewwwww stuff that you see.