On Call: How not to maintain computers

Crossposted from https://beehaw.org/post/24258253

This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Wilson” who once worked as the boss of a welding shop attached to an engineering consultancy.

Wilson set the scene by telling us this story came from the early 1980s, when AutoCAD was replacing drawing boards.

“We had a new structural engineer who those of us in the shop quickly identified as an idiot with a degree,” Wilson wrote.

One day, said idiot decided that the computers used to run AutoCAD needed to be cleaned and that the welding shop was the place to do the job.

  • pageflight@piefed.socialEnglish
    5·
    1 day ago

    “It’s at 90 PSI and is 80 percent air, 15 percent water, and 5 percent oil,” Wilson said. “When he hit the boxes with this mess, he blew memory chips and any other loose bits completely out of the motherboards.”

    I’ll have to try that to get gunk out of my laptop keyboard.