More Tea Mr PC?
Occasionally I will jokingly say I can make it to an event unless someone feeds the servers tea and biscuits.
Well on Monday one of our lovely users spilt some tea into a workstation (which is not nearly as bad as it going into a server, but still not good). Actually they spilt it under the computer, but since the Mac Mini's air vents are on it's underside the tea lapped around the sides and up into the internal components at the front.
What the users then should have done is immediately turned the computer off and contacted the experts in their in-house IT department (which is a bit of a rarity in small business these days).
What they actually did was mop up around the computer and keep it running. All afternoon. And the following morning. And finally deigned to call me when the thing finally stopped working. Apparently they were too embarrassed at the spill to let us know and thought things were okay since it was still running.
Well if you're under the impression that electronics will survive contact with water, let alone drinks that contain sugar, they don't. Sooner or later the residues will react with the components and either interfere with them as an insulator or conductor and change the flow of electricity going through them. At the least this will cause some erroneous operations, and at worst fry expensive components.
Well I've cleaned off the residues and bits that have reacted (there must be copper in those parts because some of it's green) with Electrical Contact cleaner and lint free cloth (coffee filters in this instance - yes they're lint free. People don't come back if there's lint in their coffee), so we'll leave it overnight to completely dry out and see just how dead or alive it is tomorrow.
Well on Monday one of our lovely users spilt some tea into a workstation (which is not nearly as bad as it going into a server, but still not good). Actually they spilt it under the computer, but since the Mac Mini's air vents are on it's underside the tea lapped around the sides and up into the internal components at the front.
What the users then should have done is immediately turned the computer off and contacted the experts in their in-house IT department (which is a bit of a rarity in small business these days).
What they actually did was mop up around the computer and keep it running. All afternoon. And the following morning. And finally deigned to call me when the thing finally stopped working. Apparently they were too embarrassed at the spill to let us know and thought things were okay since it was still running.
Well if you're under the impression that electronics will survive contact with water, let alone drinks that contain sugar, they don't. Sooner or later the residues will react with the components and either interfere with them as an insulator or conductor and change the flow of electricity going through them. At the least this will cause some erroneous operations, and at worst fry expensive components.
Well I've cleaned off the residues and bits that have reacted (there must be copper in those parts because some of it's green) with Electrical Contact cleaner and lint free cloth (coffee filters in this instance - yes they're lint free. People don't come back if there's lint in their coffee), so we'll leave it overnight to completely dry out and see just how dead or alive it is tomorrow.