I was a computer technician for many years, and I saw A LOT of things, I'll try to name the ones I remember right away:
- Once a lady brought me a desktop compaq K6, and said that the machine suddenly stopped working. When I opened the machine, there were firecracker capsules and fireworks. In conclusion, her children put the firecrackers and fireworks down the back of the case, and blew up the computer and claimed that it simply stopped working.
- I found a Pentium 4 2.3ghz which I believe was an engineering sample, the interesting thing is that the owner had no idea about it, he just bought the computer over the internet.
- A 486 came to me with the HD completely corrupted, I booted it with a boot disk and with the dir command, I got a screen full of artifacts instead of letters, the HD was really fucked up. So I opened the case to replace the HD, and to my surprise, the ide flat cable was gnawed, there was a mouse housing, and typical mouse nest dirt. The most impressive thing is that I don't really know how the mouse got there, there was only a small space of an isa slot that was open behind the machine, somehow the mouse got through there. The computer belonged to a small market/grocery store.
- There was also a case where a floppy drive didn't work, and there was a little Lego figure inside it.
- I got a computer once, it was from a boy who said that after upgrading, the computer didn't work anymore. So his mother bought him another one. When I opened it, I noticed that the DDR slot was scorched, and that the guy had managed to fit a DDR module backwards. He applied so much force that the module clicked and locked, when turning on the machine, there must have been a short circuit. The most amazing thing wasn't that, it was that after removing the module, even with the scorched and melted slot, the machine booted, and it only worked with the other slot!
- Once a computer came to me at the store where I worked, the guy asked to format and reinstall Windows XP, and asked me to save his files. The machine went to the shelf waiting for its turn, and a few minutes later the guy called saying that he didn't need to save his files anymore, but he speak in a strange way (with some fear), I was 16 years old at the time, and this ended up arousing my interest in the contents of the machine hd. It's unethical, but I figured maybe it had pictures of his wife naked or something (puberty). To my chagrin and despair, I found a folder full of pictures of children. I didn't know what to do, I told my boss, who immediately called the police. The cops advised to pretend that nothing happened, and call the owner to come get the computer, to prevent him from escaping, the cops went out and arranged with us, so that when he arrived and was at the store, one of us would turn on the facade light as a signal. Fortunately all went well, the guy was arrested, and more content was found in his house, including banned books.