Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!ibmchs!auschs!sauer
From: sauer@auschs.UUCP (Charlie Sauer)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: computer follies
Summary: water your computer and watch it glow...  (abusing diskettes is for wimps?)
Message-ID: <1216@auschs.UUCP>
Date: 11 Sep 88 02:37:10 GMT
Organization: IBM AES, Austin, TX
Lines: 34

Since the discussion seems almost stuck in stories of abuse of removable media,
I'll offer a diversion with recollection of one (two) of my more embarassing
and trying experiences.

I had a pot of Swedish ivy sitting on top of my primary machine, a floor
standing RT.  When I come in in the morning, I dump any water left in my 
tea pot in the ivy pot (and make my tea with fresh water, of course).

One morning the tea pot was nearly full, but I went ahead with my usual ritual,
not thinking about the consequences.  I was typing away and started getting
error messages I had never seen before, about memory failures and so forth.
After a kernel panic I powered off and on to try to run some diagnostics,
but the machine wouldn't come up at all.  After a couple of calls to service
people, I realized what had happened.

The side covers join in the middle of the top of the machine.  Water had 
entered that joint and spilled all the way down inside.  The disks are 
at the top and they stayed dry.  The motherboard is vertical, so it didn't 
get very wet.  The power supply is sufficiently well encased that it didn't 
get wet inside.  But all of the I/O cards, memory cards and the processor 
card had standing water on them!

I wiped up the water as well as I could with paper towels, pulled all the 
cards and let them stand vertically to drain, and waited an hour or so.  I
put everything back together and had returned to normal operation by noon.
A month or so later I made the same mistake, but caught most of the water
before it got inside, so there was no service interruption.  The ivy now
has a separate stand and only tape cartridges and diskettes get left on
top of the machine...

-- 
Charlie Sauer   IBM AES/ESD, D75/802     uucp: cs.utexas.edu!ibmaus!sauer
                11400 Burnet Road       csnet: ibmaus!sauer@CS.UTEXAS.EDU
                Austin, Texas 78758    aesnet: sauer@auschs  
                (512) 823-3692           vnet: SAUER at AUSVM6