Here is kind of a scary one. Back when the iMac first came out and we had to repair them not a lot of us had tons of CRT experience. Well this co-worker of mine and me were pretty much the only mac techs. So we got stuck repairing all the iMacs (and I have repaired probably over 1,000 easily since they have been out). One thing you may notice about some techs, or the more experienced they get they will sometimes skip small precautions or steps. For example, I pretty much never wear a static strap anymore. They just seem to get in my way. Well, he didn't discharge the CRT (which I am guilty of as well, I didn't discharge every CRT I ever touched). I'm not exactly sure what happened, but I believe he took the anode cap off and brushed the metal connection of it along a metal heatsink. I saw him convulse a few times and fly back about 6 ft. He was okay, but still a bit scary. After that I discharged the crap out of every CRT that I have fixed. Especially the apple studio ones, remember the big old tank 22" studio monitor that weighed like 90lbs?

A wise Choice:)
 

A wise Choice:)


What did you dislike more Flat Imac or Imac from a disasembly perspective....
-------

I know some of the Power Computing ones while not intricate were more like Razor Cases (as were all low cost cases from far away).

well, the crt imac I have disassembled reassembled countless and countless times. Most common replaced part was the PAV (power analog video) board in the CRT iMacs. The flat panels are okay, but I hate replacing or removing the neck for any reason. If you have to replace the neck or the screen (or any of the screens componets like the bezel, etc.) its really annoying due to how they route the cables from the neck down to the rest of the imac. Sometimes I will spend like 30 minutes making sure all the cables will reach every port they plug into since they are routed and harnessed kinda awkwardly from the neck. Plus apple just recently changed the design of the flat panels, so what I was finally used to, is now different. I can't say I dislike one more than the other. I must admit a lot of times it is kinda fun to take them apart. Emacs aren't that bad since the PAV/CRT is all one assembly so troubleshooting them is a bit easier. I think the most annoying apple product is the ibook. Great machine, but designed poorly from a take apart view. You have to completely take an ibook apart to replace the HD. Most laptops you just have to get to a certain point or there is even an access panel right to the HD, but not in the ibook.

Thanx
 

Thanx... For Sharing...
-----------------------------------

I had sudden Flash about the Movie with the Robot Johnny 5 (forgot the movie name).

Johnny 5 /Disasemmble No Disassemble Routine:)

... If you play with hardware and you have seen the movie it hard not to muse about it sometimes...

Short Circuit

Yeah Yeah
 

That. That. You Pegged it.

I turned Off the "Hard Drive" (which is always the monitor or Computer:)

okay...how bout this one

Los locos kick yer @zz!
los locos kick yer face!
los locos kick yer balls into outer space!

....From short circuit 2 baby

hmm no one has anymore stories?
 

Out of all the admins, web designers, techs, etc we don't have anymore funny/horror stories?


I remember a few years back we got the feliz navidad virus in our email server. Its mostly harmless virus, just annoying. It opens the maximum amount of windows that you can on your desktop so you can't really do anything else, cuz more random windows pop up. It was easily fixed just by running the latest NAV on the system. The only problem is that it was one of those mass mailer ones. The ones that attached themselves to every email in your address book and would send itself out. Well I would clean off one of the bosses machines (I got stuck cleaning off all the bosses machines) and 15 min later the virus would be back in their inbox. Well our email server is at our home office, which is many many miles away from our location. So I thought I would call MIS.

MIS: hello MIS
Me: Hi, this is tom from location ____ and we found that there is the feliz navidad virus on the email server, and it keeps copying itself from everyone's address book. Could you shut down the email server for a few minutes so we can clean all the machines of the virus.
MIS: Um, no shutting down the email server won't help, and we know, we have known about the virus for about 5 hours now.
Me: 5 hours? Why didn't you contact us, so I could have kept everyone out of their email.
MIS: We'll contact you once we have fixed it.
Me: Okay thanks.....I guess

About an hour later I get a call from one of the bosses.

Boss: Hey tom, come back to my office I can't get my email, and I need to send out this report its due today
Me: Okay I'll be there in a sec

I get back there and sure enough SMTP, and POP3 fail to connect to the server. So I call MIS (and this is almost 2 1/2 hrs after I first talked to them)

MIS: Hello MIS
Me: Yeah, is the email server down?
MIS: Yeah we had to shut it down for a sec and reboot it to get rid of that virus
ME: Ah okay, so eta on when it will be back up?
MIS: 30min approx

My conclusion MIS = worthless

great stories
 

I love hearing these stories. I think no matter what field we work in, we all have those kinds of stories. I know I do. I work in optical and i have worked in retail and i have way too many "stupid people" stories to post. I like reading these so i'll know what not to say to a tech. so they don't think i'm a complete idiot! ha ha ha I know I have asked some pretty stupid questions but each time i learn something knew and have the common sense not to make the same mistake again. Keep those stories coming. They are great!
Teri

This is the coatroom, go ahead and share some stories.

v

I've not got the quality stories of everyone else, I only work for a small company, but I've had some right funny requests:

*phone rings
ME: Hello?
USER: My keyboard needs rep-programming
ME: Re-programming? <what the hell does that mean, does he know?>
USER: Yep, re-programming, all the buttons have lost there settings.
ME: Right what is happening? are you getting any output from the keyboard or error messages?
USER: The keyboard is printing stuff but only little stars!
ME: Just type in your password and click ok!!

I once had this iMac from this user and she said she had problems surfing the internet, and got error messages. Well I hooked up the little rig to our network and started surfing through our proxy just fine. So I called her up and asked her to come in and show me exactly what it was doing so I could fix it. So she came down to the tech shop and I showed her it browsed the internet just fine. She then told me it was on certain websites. So I asked her to show me what the error message was. She made her kids leave the room, and I was kinda nervous to exactly see what the problem was. She pulled up some bondage pr0n site and got a java script error. It was really hard to keep a straight face after that. Not to mention this lady looked like your typical soccer mom.

Had a similar problem with a 98 box, but the real embarassing problem was it was my mums!

She complained the pc was real slow, so I went round to have a look and first of clear down the cache and cookies. She watched me and asked what was going on. I explained what cookies were and how they get there, I decided to just randomly click on one. Whoops, cookie from SexTracker with my younger brothers details in it. My mum was now very interested and wanted to see some more, appears my brother was getting very busy on the pc and had clogged it up with p0rn!

Here's one that happened just the other day. I was working on a PC for once and the powersupply immediately started smoking when you powered it on. So I quickly turned it off by pulling the plug out. I opened it up (and it smelled awful, I hate electrical burn smell) and to my surprise there was some kind of spider colony in there or something and they caught on fire or burned up the powersupply or something. I really hate spiders too. Some were still alive so I quickly threw the powersupply outside in the dumpster with the spiders in it. I have no idea what kind of spiders they were, and I don't care I just don't want them in my work space.

Called up the end user and found out he had this computer in his work shed to run some kind of mill thing that drills out ceramics (or something to that effect). I told him to bug bomb his work shed.

so much hate! :D

and bugs are good; without them we'd be up to our eyeballs in goo. spiders are good bugs because they eat bad bugs. old saw: killing spiders brings bad luck.

electrical equipment needs a fairly clean/cleanable, environment, not chemical warfare.

we will lose any war against bugs.

Should've charged him extra for the debugging! :D

--Zed :cool:

Yeah but spiders are scary. I like them when they are off not bothering me catching bugs when they start jumping out of a power supply at me I don't really appreciate it.

Yeah bugs that kill and eat other bugs are good I agree, but bugs nesting in your electronic equipment is bad.

I just don't like spiders I have had some bad experiences with them. Got bit by a brown recluse once and it was not good.

I have a few stories I could share...

I used to work for a junior high school fixing/repairing a bunch of their Macs. I would do routine jobs like installing software and new RAM, as well as fixing the multitude of problems that existed all over the two computer labs.

One time, after installing some RAM, I created a little AppleScript and placed it into the startup items folder of the teacher's computer. So next time it started up, it displayed a little message that said, "The RAM that was recently installed was bad, and you must have it replaced!", or something to that effect. I made it blatantly obvious that it was a joke (especially since I said as much in a subsequent dialog), but the teacher took it seriously and I almost got a student in trouble at the school. :p Even the most humorous teachers seem to have an aversion to technology that makes them go ballistic when someone plays a harmless joke on them.


Before I became one of the repair guys for the school (I actually went to that school), I did some cracking of Foolproof. Anybody know that security program? I think schools used to like it a lot, but one of the funny things in the early days was that it didn't really know that much about AppleScript (or maybe the administrator just set it up wrong). In any case, I made a little AppleScript (called the Handy Dandy Script) that did all sorts of unauthorized actions that were prevented by FoolProof, and since FoolProof wasn't AppleScript-aware, it didn't really care.

The script itself was harmless, and it just did things like getting info on a file, and things like that. The one thing that it did do that was potentially harmful was that it replaced the Finder with a modified version of the application. The only thing I used that for, though, was to change the startup picture of the Mac OS smiley face to one that was a frowny face. :D I don't think the administrators ever figured out how I did that (though they didn't know that I, personally, had done that).

That was kind of off-topic, since that wasn't really a repair or anything, but I thought I'd share. :)



Let's see, what's a good repair story.... reeepair story... *thinks* .

I know that I had a lot of the repair stories of the kind where just your presence makes the problem goes away. Obviously, that's not the case, and it's just that the user couldn't reproduce the problem, but I got the reputation that I only need be present in the room for a problem not to assert itself. It's kind of annoying when users don't remember exactly how they got the problem to occur. :rolleyes:

I'll get back to you guys. I'm sure I can eventually think up some good stories. :)

And this guy wants to run for a political office?! :eek:

Voter beware! :cool:

those are qualifications, Phil :D