Bizarre methods of destruction regularly pop up in folklore online. The most celebrated examples are the Darwin Awards, which "honour those who improve our gene pool... by removing themselves from it." The top ten most bizarre computer mishaps indicate that computers and their data, happily, meet relatively uneventful ends compared to the fates of their human counterparts.
The list of bizarre computer mishaps, compiled by data recovery experts Kroll Ontrack, does include several notebook owners whose equipment befell unusual fates.
For instance, at No. 2 on the list is a man who threw his computer out of the window in an attempt to destroy evidence when he found out the police were coming to seize his PC and arrest him. This man may have failed to stay one step ahead of the law, but did manage one place ahead of number three, who dropped his laptop out of his bag while riding a moped; the computer was then run over by a lorry before the man noticed he had lost it.
But from No. 4 downwards the results are perhaps best viewed as illustrating that the world of IT is a relatively safe and uneventful place. They include people who variously spilt wine and café latte on their notebooks, dropped their notebooks in the bath or in a river, threw them against a wall, or left them on top of the car and drove off.
The number seven spot is practically the computer equivalent of dying of old age in your sleep -- the place is held by a server that collected a lot of dust, causing it to malfunction.
If you know of a computer mishap more bizarre than those above, record it in our TalkBack below.
Talkback
My wife came home drunk one night and lied down on the couch next to my new laptop.
A few minutes later she complained of feeling a little unwell and promptly vomited all over my laptop.
I had to go around to my friends house who is a hardware engineer and we had to remove diced carrots from the motherboard
It never worked the same after that.
In the late eighties Psions main mini computer was effectively buzzed to death by an enormous vibrator!
The builders on the adjacent site were experimenting with different techniques of pile driving. One of these involved the use of giant vibrators placed on top of the piles. Although apparently a very quick and effective way of driving the piles into the ground it also shook the Psion development building to the foundations. This all proved a bit too much for the main development mini computer which suffered the computer equivalent of a cardiac arrest. It took the DEC engineers the best part of a day to bring it back from the dead.
I had a user who brought her laptop in to me after she had a car accident. She stated that she wasn't able to get it started. When I opened the lid, I noticed sand and it smelled of sea water. I asked what happened and she stated that she was driving on a road near the coast and had a car accident. The laptop flew out a rear window and landed in the water. The Hard Drive ran just long enough to recover critical files, and that was all she wrote.
I have had a customer whos floppy drive failed due to a 2 inch stell washer being jammed in the works. Maybe he though it would reveal some arcane engineering data???
Another claimed not to know why his PC had failed but on removing the lid I noticed a "tide" mark of rust up to about half of the case. When pressed he admitted that they had had a burst pipe and it may have sat in a few inches of water for several weeks.
Another common fault is a failed PSU caused by the 240V switch being moved to 120V while power was on. This vapourises the fuses and blows the tops of the regulator chips.
My favourite PC fault happened after the machine had been returned to the UK from abroad. The fault report read " short circuit of graphics card caused by 400 benson and hedges jammed in case". The spikey back of the card had pieced the celophane and the foil wrapper ahd caused the short.
An airport shuttle van was dropping me off at home after a long business trip. As the driver removed my luggage from the back of the van, I began to move it from the driveway to the lawn. Distracted by a friend, I looked away for a minute. When I finally looked back I didn't see my laptop. At first I feared he'd simply driven away with it, but then I noticed a dark shape about thirty feet away. The van driver had backed over the laptop, dragging it across the asphalt into the middle of the street!
A ghekko lizard once climbed into our laser printer. It must have short-circuited something, and in the process destroyed both itself and the laser printer. What's more, as anybody who has ever worked in the tropics will know, dead ghekkos smell really, really bad. Even when we did finally manage to get the laser printer fixed again, it forever stank of dead ghekko.
Most clients tell me they simply wish to throw their PCs out the window. House windows in the south of Spain have bars on them though. Laptops would fit nicely...
Laptops with sherry spilt on them smell nice. They don't type well though. Nor do laptops doused in wine by girlfriends.
Fanta Orange might be great for those hot summer days, but it isn't a good coolant for laptops.
I once had a client whose PC's powerpack was blown when the worksite it was at detonated the demolitions charges used to pull down a building.
There was one time I serviced a non-printing printer and found a walnut shell inside...
Another printer wouldn't feed paper: removing the credit card shuffled among the papers solved the problem.
ok