What to do when your computer catches on FIRE!

[mishaday]

First, calmly step away from the computer and call your help desk. Do not panic. Your friendly neighborhood help desk tech will kindly panic for you and come tearing down to the lab on the other end of the bloody campus to help you out.

When she comes tearing down to your lab in the hinterlands, tell her about the sparks and the smoke. She will embellish your story to include the requisite leaping flames and 'kerflooie'-ness of the situation when she reports the incident to her superiors and yours.

Despite the fact that your computer CAUGHT ON FIRE, your tech will perform miracles and extract the hard drive from the pile of molten slag (well, it could have been, the top vent's discolored!) and present all your data from your desktop to you on a shiny little cd. She will also not remind you that it all should have been stored on the server to begin with.

--

So yeah, today's excitement included an ancient iMac sparking and dying. Whee!

Comments

[chrismm.livejournal.com]

Heh. I had that happen once to a new client--a very badly seated parallel port card (standard 'reconfigured' to low-profile by ripping the bracket off and just shoving it in the slot) with a printer plugged into it, combined with lots of dust bunnies inside the box. Smoke everywhere, a few actual teeny flames even, and scared the crap out of the user.

[unmisha.livejournal.com]

Heh - I think I was more disturbed than my user, and I didn't even see the sparkage or the smoke. I haven't bothered to track down the actual fault, since the computer's more than 5 years old (it's verging on 7, and we stop supporting them at 5) just declared it dead and moved on.

I hope you weren't hurt.

[tieyah.livejournal.com]

I assume that because you were standing far enough away from it, you weren't hurt.
Burning wire and plastic stinks though, doesn't it?

Re: I hope you weren't hurt.

[unmisha.livejournal.com]

Hee! I was 1/4 mile away! They called me, I said 'don't touch it!' and whisked it away. There were just sparks and smoke (stank enough, though) and enough of an excuse for me to call it dead (it's been the equivalent of a shuffling zombie for a yearish- just mobile enough for the manager to say 'it's not dead yet! Let's keep it!')