I’m sure you’ve all done one dumb thing or another throughout your life and some of them may even have cost you a fair amount of money.
This morning I almost lost about $3k worth of computer equipment. As last Friday was a holiday and Saturday was my birthday, and I work from home on Mondays…I hadn’t travelled to the office in 4 days. Today I ran through my usual routine (getting up at 5am and showering, etc. etc.) and stuffed my laptop in my bag, grabbed a couple sodas, packed my iPod Touch and i’m out the door.
2.5 hours later I get to work, pull my laptop out of my bag and am about to plug it into the docking station and lo and behold the entire back of the laptop is caked in rotten, smashed banana. That’s when I remember I had it in there on Thursday for a snack but ended up not eating it.
Ever tried to clean banana out of a laptop? It’s nearly impossible. It took about an hour using towels and utencils I could find around the office. I couldn’t wash it off of course…water and laptops aren’t friendly. I thought I got everything out but I could see a little in the crevices of the monitor output and the serial port. Having decided it should be ok to boot, I booted it up. Everything seemed fine until I put it in the docking station. After windows started it then BSOD’d on me saying simply “Hardware Failure, contact your vendor”.
Groaning, and sure I could fix it myself, I cracked open the plastic casing where the power button is and there was the tiniest bit of banana down on the mother board contacting the board and the video out plug. I cleaned that up and checked elsewhere for goop but didn’t find any.
Putting it all back together, I booted once more. This time everything seems to be working which is part of the reason you can read this post now…
You can bet I won’t be keeping any kind of food in that part of my bag anymore. Although the laptop is new, I doubt the warranty covers failure due to banana goop.
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