brostenen wrote:

True that.... Depends much on ventilation. 😀 Yeah... I know any type of smoke, dust particles and sticky vapours are bad. Especially cooking oil and metal dust and rubber dust are really bad. The worst hardware I have recieved, are that wich are feeling extremely sticky (like glue) and smelling of a mixture of deep fryer and hotdogs. They are an absolute horror show. 🙁 I have a couple of items, that are smelling like burger king, though I bought them over two or three years ago. Never recieved stuff that were covered in black stuff though.

I worked in a computer store in the 90s and this Indian guy brought his 38something in for an upgrade. Part of our policy was to boot it up first before we touch it (we had lots of sneaky customers try to claim we broke stuff when it wasn't even working) - This guy's computer POSTed no problem, and while it had minimal RAM (not sure I think it was 2Mb, so long ago now), I noticed that the diagnostics were telling me it was running at 8 MHz. I inspected the TURBO button, which seemed glued to the sticky, sooty and smelly case (which looks on par with what a 386 ABS computer case looks like now - Yellowed to shit) and after some alcohol, WD40, and some elbow grease, I was able to bring the computer to 25 MHz (I think, could have been 20). I recommended an upgrade to 4MB RAM to make it faster and customer agreed. I opened it up (RAM upgrades were done in the front of the store, anything more and it went to the back) and just about gagged - A wave of curry and slight B.O. attacked me. I excused myself for a minute and I told my boss (I was like 14 at the time) about it and he laughed and said to take it outside on the loading dock and let it vent.

He then tacked "cleanup" onto the bill, to which the customer immediately protested and a verbal argument ensued between the customer and the owner (who was also Indian, albeit pretty UK-washed, and, well, much more civilized to be completely honest) and I later found out that the computer lived in the customer's kitchen as a recipe machine.

To this day, I have no idea how that computer case absorbed such a powerful amount of odours, and I will never forget how it unleashed it into my nostrils - The thought alone is currently cleaning up my sinuses.

Jed118 wrote:

I worked in a computer store in the 90s and this Indian guy brought his 38something in for an upgrade. Part of our policy was to boot it up first before we touch it (we had lots of sneaky customers try to claim we broke stuff when it wasn't even working) - This guy's computer POSTed no problem, and while it had minimal RAM (not sure I think it was 2Mb, so long ago now), I noticed that the diagnostics were telling me it was running at 8 MHz. I inspected the TURBO button, which seemed glued to the sticky, sooty and smelly case (which looks on par with what a 386 ABS computer case looks like now - Yellowed to shit) and after some alcohol, WD40, and some elbow grease, I was able to bring the computer to 25 MHz (I think, could have been 20). I recommended an upgrade to 4MB RAM to make it faster and customer agreed. I opened it up (RAM upgrades were done in the front of the store, anything more and it went to the back) and just about gagged - A wave of curry and slight B.O. attacked me. I excused myself for a minute and I told my boss (I was like 14 at the time) about it and he laughed and said to take it outside on the loading dock and let it vent.

He then tacked "cleanup" onto the bill, to which the customer immediately protested and a verbal argument ensued between the customer and the owner (who was also Indian, albeit pretty UK-washed, and, well, much more civilized to be completely honest) and I later found out that the computer lived in the customer's kitchen as a recipe machine.

To this day, I have no idea how that computer case absorbed such a powerful amount of odours, and I will never forget how it unleashed it into my nostrils - The thought alone is currently cleaning up my sinuses.

🤣

Yeah, indian food is known to cause that effect. In the company I used to work for, at lunch time there was a race to get to the microwave before the indian guys, because once the curry got in there it would render the microwave (and most of the lunch area) pretty much unusable. 😁

I remember the lady who had the task of cleaning up that mess every day complaining about how much cleaning product it took to remove the smell. 😵