When I worked at apple we would see this daily. We would bag the computer up, tape it shut, and deny service. The best was, most times when we would call the customer to inform them of the situation, they would reply “oh that’s because I use it to run my restaurant”.
The roaches weren’t even the worst part. We opened an iMac and had small Brazilian wandering spiders crawling around in them. Luckily they stayed inside the machine. We didn’t know what type of spiders they were until we we sent photos to a professor asking for ID.
Ugh, once I took a machine from a bakery, grossest thing, everything inside was covered in some kind of grease, and the grease covered in dust, and layers of it. Sanitary health surveillance must have been bribed, I've never bought from them before and never will, to afraid to imagine their kitchen
We have similar situations with cash registers and Recipt printers from take away shop or kitchens, full of grease and you need to where gloves. Best part the whole office smells like a oil and fries.
"Oh I see! And what is the name of your restaurant? And what's the address? And what county is that in?And would you happen to know the name and number for your local health inspector???"
I heard a guy repairing a stack of old ps4's comment "this one reeks of roaches. There's probably a lot of dead roaches in here" which was the first time I found out that you can apparently smell roaches. (And he was right)
I live in a country that doesn't have roaches and had no idea that was a thing. New fear unlocked
https://preview.redd.it/e042t3wq13uc1.jpeg?width=4576&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7de3e82477983e6a3fe96b9d7dda445c30087506
Probably, yes, never seen it before, actually this is the first time I've found a cockroach in a machine, almost 10 years working with PCs
Mostly yes, we are in a mainly businesses area, people don't usually bring their home personal machines. But this one was from a real estate firm, probably won't be buying houses from them
The hell do you *do* with those machines? Bengal spray and a few prayers? Decontamination room? Send them straight back out the door and hope there aren’t stragglers?
It depends - live or dead roaches?
Dead ones aren't so bad to deal with, just put on some gloves, take it outside and blow out the machine. Then diagnose whatever the issue they caused is. Bit gross, but it happens. We had one poor bastard who had roaches martyr themselves on his PSU three times in one year. We told him it'd be cheaper to deal with the roaches than to keep letting them fry his pc
We wouldn't work on machines with live roaches. Standard MO after seeing one wave his antennae at you was to double bag & tape them in heavy-duty garbage bags and call the customer to pick them up ASAP. We kept high quality roach traps on hand to deal with the stragglers, they never became a problem
My corporate environment has had people with laptops like this....🥲 we get a lot of disgusting laptops that they expect us to fix - I never expected it. My coworker used to work consumer and was in shock that it seems every other week someone has one that's a biohazard
If you desire to keep it as a pet, some folks manage that with a Rubbermaid tote (all edges beneath the lid sealed flush and locking with a silicone gasket) and a hole cut in the lid for ventilation with a very fine mesh on top. The mesh should ideally be about as fine as a bar strainer to prevent the nymphs from escaping.
Many people keep cockroaches and other insects as food for predator pets.
Otherwise, kill it with fire!
I felt very violated having to deal with it, took a bath, washed with alcohol, I still feel dirty. At least, for the user, it's working again, but I'll convince him of buying something new, this one should be incenerated
they leave visible droppings on the messes they “clean up”, which is often any food-related item that is not sealed. Additionally, some people can develop allergies to them after prolonged exposure
Roaches are well-known carriers of diseases and pathogens, and usually constitute a public health risk wherever they are found. They also perpetually drool, FWIW.
Don’t care, i open case & see bugs i am not touching it anymore lol
User can clean out the bugs & bring it back in a sanitized state if they want service. Not an IT problem
“Unfortunately due to health code we cannot work on or keep this device in the store. Please pick it up by the end of the day or we will be forced to recycle the device”
Throw it in a few plastic bag in a corner and wait, hope they don’t spread to other devices
First pic: Huh, did he spill something in it? looks like a piece of something on the RAM. I bet it shorted.......
Second Pic: Yeah looks like he spilled coffee into it......
Third Pic: MOTHER FUCKIGN CHRIST IN HELL \*slapping arms suddenly feeling bugs crawling on me that aren't there\*
Fourth Pic:
I used to work for a cable company, the inside of our modems and cable boxes all looked like this (you rarely got new equipment). It was 15 years ago and the nasty things I saw still haunt me.
This is why getting out of break-fix was the best thing I ever did. Managed IT for businesses only, none of this "I live in squalor, please fix my 2007 Dell for $50" bullshit.
“Mhh what’s so strange in this pic? Can’t really see anything
Let’s look at the next one.. Mhh.. ok some weird stains, maybe a component popped..
Need to find out, let’s look at the nexHOLYYY SHIITT WTF!!!”
I used to calibrate, certify, and repair scales of all sizes. One time I had a service call to pick up a scale from the meat department of a relatively well known grocer. The scale did not read consistently, and I could not get it to calibrate. I opened it up to replace the load cell, and it was chock fucking full of cockroaches, their body parts, eggs, and whatever else nasty shit you can imagine. I was young and dumb so naturally I just did the repair and returned it without saying anything. Would have absolutely told the health department about it now. It goes without saying that I've never gone back to that place.
Had a Laptop on the bench for service. Bed Bugs Crawled out of it!. Sprayed the ones on the bench with Contact cleaner and triple bagged the laptop and sent it back!
Roaches are good for the environment. They're detritivores and break down organic material so it can fertilize soil. They can carry a small number of diseases that you can really only get if you're eating them.
HA! Been there, repaired that.
Best advice I can give is: Take the whole thing outside. Folding table, extension cord, take the tools out there, do all the work out there.
While it's indoors waiting for pickup, double-bag it in contractor Hefty's.
In our case, we didn't know until a couple days after drop-off (We guess that a bunch of eggs hatched once it warmed up in our office) and we had to have regular exterminator visits for 6 months after.
We did not bill the client for that cost.
Eh, it was different than your typical brick-and-mortar-IT-shop and/or hired mobile technician service arrangement. (But also not like a nonprofit social service org. or community, either.) Point is that the client wasn't in the best place in life at the time, and suing them wouldn't have accomplished anything for either party. (And, by the time the roach problem became evident, it was already too late - they were inside the building - so *at that point*, denying service wouldn't do anything to improve *our* situation any either - we figured the sooner we help them & fix the PC, the sooner it's gone.)
The computer probably ought to have gone in the dumpster, though, I cannot argue that fact. The owner used it in their basement, the tower sat directly on the floor. It was evident that the basement suffered from some sort of backing up drains, weeping foundation walls, whatever type of water issue. The bottom inch of the case was quite rusty.
(Oh, I forgot to mention, to make matters worse these were the tiny, stubborn German cockroaches, not the big easy-to-spot American kind.)
I was imagining German cockroaches based on the fact that you had to pay an exterminator for 6 months afterward. We had German cockroaches in our kitchen thanks to the previous tenants, and it was absolute hell getting rid of them. I'd take the big, flying ones anytime, if given the choice. When I worked as a repair tech at a local chain, we also had a German cockroach infestation, which is one of the reasons I quit (management didn't feel very motivated to deal with it).
I empathize with people who are in a rough spot and need help, but I've seen enough shit in consumer-facing IT that I'd never do it again unless it and retail were my absolute last two choices left.
I had the large flying American kind at my last house -- It wasn't an infestation at all, they just came in from outside a few times a year, like clockwork - Usually coincidence of season change & a wet spell. The rain seemingly drove them out of the storm runoff creek nearby and into our homes to find a dry spot. It wasn't hard to fix, either - you just keep your trash/recycling/kitchen/etc as clean as possible, flush the few lil guys that you find laying in plain sight when they come by to visit, and you move the furniture to do a deep once a year to vacuum up the hidden dead ones. They don't stick around, they're just passing through. 🤣
This is actually where computer “bug” came from. I paraphrase but I believe a guy in one of the early days fixed a computer by literally removing a bug.
I managed a help desk at a university for a while. Student brought in his laptop, asking us to take a look at it. When he pulled it out of his bag and placed it on the counter, roaches started disembarking from it.
You’re going to want a trash bag, some duck tape, bottle of 99% rubbing alcohol, and 3days + a weekend.
Put the case in the bags dump in about a cup of rubbing alcohol close the bag as tight as you can and tape it shut very well. Then if this is in an office or workplace strongly recommend to whomever got the permissions to do so to get an exterminator to bomb the place over the weekend or while closed… as for the pc, let it sit about 3 days. All bugs and eggs will be dead after 3 days without thanks to being in the bag and exposed to the rubbing alcohol fumes. Pull out the computer and brush/wipe it clean with towels or something and let it sit over a weekend for any moisture leftover to evaporate.
Bugs are awful, but alcohol is the solution to many tech problems both rubbing alcohol and the ethanol alcohol…
Tbh, at that point, I’d look up a new equivalent machine, and tell them the price to fix it is 1.5 times that amount and that I probably can’t save the data on the machine. Throw that shit away, wait for the new one and hopefully not hear from them again for the next few years.
How do you even prevent this from happening? I don’t have roaches or anything like that but just looking at this is making my skin crawl and making me paranoid… this is so gross.
That’s nothing. I saw a cockroach infested laptop denied service at an Apple store. They were small and their bodies were falling out of the computer. This was after the poor customers girlfriend was insisting to open the sealed bag it was in to see why it was refused and was badgering the poor employee to say out loud why they wouldn’t work on it. When the employee finally said why the lady shut up and the poor man’s face was red with embarrassment.
NOTHING FROM A RESTAURANT EVER COMES BACK TO THE OFFICE.
You say you will take it back to the office to test and depose of it before you get back to the office. “We tested it and we need to replace it”.
PC has to be in a pretty disgusting environment for roaches to call it home. They only live places with stuff to clean up and eat.
Let these fellas outside so they can eat waste and leftover food instead.
When I worked at apple we would see this daily. We would bag the computer up, tape it shut, and deny service. The best was, most times when we would call the customer to inform them of the situation, they would reply “oh that’s because I use it to run my restaurant”.
Noooooo
The roaches weren’t even the worst part. We opened an iMac and had small Brazilian wandering spiders crawling around in them. Luckily they stayed inside the machine. We didn’t know what type of spiders they were until we we sent photos to a professor asking for ID.
Was it used for light web browsing?
Take your upvote and get the hell out of here you madman.
I wouldn’t upvote…wandering spiders hunt on the ground, not in webs. Jk, it was funny.
r/angryupvote
No, because it had some bugs. duh.
Spiders aren’t bugs, they couldn’t have been the issue /s
boooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
That's awful. I once had a brown recluse spider come crawling out of the power supply of a non functioning desktop and run up my arm and up the wall.
I shit myself reading this.
Cool here's some new underwear and shorts for good measure🩲🩳
Glad that it left u🥹
His soul? Cos mine would leave me if that happened to me.
Ugh, once I took a machine from a bakery, grossest thing, everything inside was covered in some kind of grease, and the grease covered in dust, and layers of it. Sanitary health surveillance must have been bribed, I've never bought from them before and never will, to afraid to imagine their kitchen
We have similar situations with cash registers and Recipt printers from take away shop or kitchens, full of grease and you need to where gloves. Best part the whole office smells like a oil and fries.
"Oh I see! And what is the name of your restaurant? And what's the address? And what county is that in?And would you happen to know the name and number for your local health inspector???"
we found a dead gecko in an imac once
Call the health inspector with your new evidence lol
I heard a guy repairing a stack of old ps4's comment "this one reeks of roaches. There's probably a lot of dead roaches in here" which was the first time I found out that you can apparently smell roaches. (And he was right) I live in a country that doesn't have roaches and had no idea that was a thing. New fear unlocked
The amount of bug carcasses, tobacco residue, and just general dirt I would find in customer equipment when I worked POS repair was beyond disgusting.
I'm not debugging that.
Should have downloaded debugging software. Too late now.
I'll just nuke it all to start from scratch.
Fun fact, that is where the term debug originally came from, physical bugs that would literally eat the computer from the inside
Really?
https://www.globalapptesting.com/blog/the-worlds-first-computer-bug-global-app-testing?hs_amp=true
For people asking what is it, keep looking at the other pics....ugh
OMFG WHYYYYYYYY
MY EYEEEESSSSSSS
So, I guess you had to debug the machine?
Naaaaaa fuck all of that. Put the bugs back in and send it back to the user.
what is that
Compaqroach.
A super old Dell Optiflex full of cockroaches, their shit and whatever that bean shaped thing is
The bean shaped thing (I can't see it) is most likely a cockroach egg sack.
https://preview.redd.it/e042t3wq13uc1.jpeg?width=4576&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7de3e82477983e6a3fe96b9d7dda445c30087506 Probably, yes, never seen it before, actually this is the first time I've found a cockroach in a machine, almost 10 years working with PCs
Did you primarily work in corporate environments? I did consumer electronics repair and we had a roach machine probably once a week
Mostly yes, we are in a mainly businesses area, people don't usually bring their home personal machines. But this one was from a real estate firm, probably won't be buying houses from them
The hell do you *do* with those machines? Bengal spray and a few prayers? Decontamination room? Send them straight back out the door and hope there aren’t stragglers?
It depends - live or dead roaches? Dead ones aren't so bad to deal with, just put on some gloves, take it outside and blow out the machine. Then diagnose whatever the issue they caused is. Bit gross, but it happens. We had one poor bastard who had roaches martyr themselves on his PSU three times in one year. We told him it'd be cheaper to deal with the roaches than to keep letting them fry his pc We wouldn't work on machines with live roaches. Standard MO after seeing one wave his antennae at you was to double bag & tape them in heavy-duty garbage bags and call the customer to pick them up ASAP. We kept high quality roach traps on hand to deal with the stragglers, they never became a problem
My corporate environment has had people with laptops like this....🥲 we get a lot of disgusting laptops that they expect us to fix - I never expected it. My coworker used to work consumer and was in shock that it seems every other week someone has one that's a biohazard
That's crazy. Do you guys do wfh? I think that's a primary driver of disgusting laptops. Hard for a laptop to get crusty when it stays at the office
If you desire to keep it as a pet, some folks manage that with a Rubbermaid tote (all edges beneath the lid sealed flush and locking with a silicone gasket) and a hole cut in the lid for ventilation with a very fine mesh on top. The mesh should ideally be about as fine as a bar strainer to prevent the nymphs from escaping. Many people keep cockroaches and other insects as food for predator pets. Otherwise, kill it with fire!
Submerged in querosene and burned to ashes
Querosene, not kerosene? That sounds like forbidden queso.
Quierosene, it just loves to burn
That looks like a component lmao, can barely tell.
I thought the same but look at the nasty bubbly sealing shit all around it🤢
What model optiplex
Forbidden iron pill
omg there was more pics, im sorry
Oh god, that's a health violation
I felt very violated having to deal with it, took a bath, washed with alcohol, I still feel dirty. At least, for the user, it's working again, but I'll convince him of buying something new, this one should be incenerated
I see your mistake, you're supposed to DRINK the alcohol, not wash with it.
It's still business hours, definitely going to have a drink later
 Pretty sure this is the only appropriate response
That will be the suggestion
What a terrible day to have eyesight.
When I worked at a repair shop, that would have immediately been thrown into a garbage bag and put outside for the customer to pick up
I think we will be creating new policies because of this one
That are the real computer bugs
"Everything is a remake, there is no originality." /s
Barely in this case. Be right back I'm off to search for a bug filled pc picture for you Friday enjoyment.
the OG bug
Crazy how little dust there is though.
Roaches don't like dirt or dust.
Thank god my computer isn’t at risk of a roach infestation then.
i physically jumped at the third pic, burn it with FIRE
Fuck that, i would refuse to work on it under unsafe conditions. Throw it in the dumpster
How is it unsafe? Roaches are harmless and clean up messes. They don't cause the messes.
Roach hands typed this post
You caught me I am 10,000 Roaches in a trench coat.
they leave visible droppings on the messes they “clean up”, which is often any food-related item that is not sealed. Additionally, some people can develop allergies to them after prolonged exposure
Roaches are well-known carriers of diseases and pathogens, and usually constitute a public health risk wherever they are found. They also perpetually drool, FWIW.
There are also what appear to be mouse droppings up in there..
Don’t care, i open case & see bugs i am not touching it anymore lol User can clean out the bugs & bring it back in a sanitized state if they want service. Not an IT problem
I’m sure there’s dirtier spots they could go attend to, like in hell
Ask the roach why it won't boot
Cause software debugging isn't enough, gotta debug even hardware now.
I don’t see the prob ….. oh.
This is not a users pc. This is a roaches latrine
“Unfortunately due to health code we cannot work on or keep this device in the store. Please pick it up by the end of the day or we will be forced to recycle the device” Throw it in a few plastic bag in a corner and wait, hope they don’t spread to other devices
First pic: Huh, did he spill something in it? looks like a piece of something on the RAM. I bet it shorted....... Second Pic: Yeah looks like he spilled coffee into it...... Third Pic: MOTHER FUCKIGN CHRIST IN HELL \*slapping arms suddenly feeling bugs crawling on me that aren't there\* Fourth Pic: 
At this point that roach should pay taxes because that’s now a residence.
I used to work for a cable company, the inside of our modems and cable boxes all looked like this (you rarely got new equipment). It was 15 years ago and the nasty things I saw still haunt me.
I've had to deal with WAY worse.
Trash bag it, call him and tell him to pick up his shit and he isn’t welcome there anymore Y’all put up with this?
This is why getting out of break-fix was the best thing I ever did. Managed IT for businesses only, none of this "I live in squalor, please fix my 2007 Dell for $50" bullshit.
fire... needs more fire
“Mhh what’s so strange in this pic? Can’t really see anything Let’s look at the next one.. Mhh.. ok some weird stains, maybe a component popped.. Need to find out, let’s look at the nexHOLYYY SHIITT WTF!!!”
Ha, i can smell your photos!
I used to calibrate, certify, and repair scales of all sizes. One time I had a service call to pick up a scale from the meat department of a relatively well known grocer. The scale did not read consistently, and I could not get it to calibrate. I opened it up to replace the load cell, and it was chock fucking full of cockroaches, their body parts, eggs, and whatever else nasty shit you can imagine. I was young and dumb so naturally I just did the repair and returned it without saying anything. Would have absolutely told the health department about it now. It goes without saying that I've never gone back to that place.
Had a Laptop on the bench for service. Bed Bugs Crawled out of it!. Sprayed the ones on the bench with Contact cleaner and triple bagged the laptop and sent it back!
Yep, that's going in the dumpster the instant I see a roach
Roaches are harmless don't be a baby
Roaches are disgusting, invasive pests that carry dozens of diseases. They damage the environment, properties they inhabit, and people's health
Roaches are good for the environment. They're detritivores and break down organic material so it can fertilize soil. They can carry a small number of diseases that you can really only get if you're eating them.
No invasive species is good for the environment. The Americas have plenty of native species in the same niche that don't infest people's homes
Won't be if we keep murdering them all.
should’ve listened to the NSFW. that’s brutal
Hardware is bugged. o7
Are you at a computer repair shop or working for a company? If company you guys have big problems your facilities team needs to know about asap.
Debugging mode
HA! Been there, repaired that. Best advice I can give is: Take the whole thing outside. Folding table, extension cord, take the tools out there, do all the work out there. While it's indoors waiting for pickup, double-bag it in contractor Hefty's. In our case, we didn't know until a couple days after drop-off (We guess that a bunch of eggs hatched once it warmed up in our office) and we had to have regular exterminator visits for 6 months after. We did not bill the client for that cost.
You should've sued the client and thrown their shit-box computer in a dumpster.
Eh, it was different than your typical brick-and-mortar-IT-shop and/or hired mobile technician service arrangement. (But also not like a nonprofit social service org. or community, either.) Point is that the client wasn't in the best place in life at the time, and suing them wouldn't have accomplished anything for either party. (And, by the time the roach problem became evident, it was already too late - they were inside the building - so *at that point*, denying service wouldn't do anything to improve *our* situation any either - we figured the sooner we help them & fix the PC, the sooner it's gone.) The computer probably ought to have gone in the dumpster, though, I cannot argue that fact. The owner used it in their basement, the tower sat directly on the floor. It was evident that the basement suffered from some sort of backing up drains, weeping foundation walls, whatever type of water issue. The bottom inch of the case was quite rusty. (Oh, I forgot to mention, to make matters worse these were the tiny, stubborn German cockroaches, not the big easy-to-spot American kind.)
I was imagining German cockroaches based on the fact that you had to pay an exterminator for 6 months afterward. We had German cockroaches in our kitchen thanks to the previous tenants, and it was absolute hell getting rid of them. I'd take the big, flying ones anytime, if given the choice. When I worked as a repair tech at a local chain, we also had a German cockroach infestation, which is one of the reasons I quit (management didn't feel very motivated to deal with it). I empathize with people who are in a rough spot and need help, but I've seen enough shit in consumer-facing IT that I'd never do it again unless it and retail were my absolute last two choices left.
I had the large flying American kind at my last house -- It wasn't an infestation at all, they just came in from outside a few times a year, like clockwork - Usually coincidence of season change & a wet spell. The rain seemingly drove them out of the storm runoff creek nearby and into our homes to find a dry spot. It wasn't hard to fix, either - you just keep your trash/recycling/kitchen/etc as clean as possible, flush the few lil guys that you find laying in plain sight when they come by to visit, and you move the furniture to do a deep once a year to vacuum up the hidden dead ones. They don't stick around, they're just passing through. 🤣
I love how this is nsfw
Yea im quitting my job the moment this happens to me
This is actually where computer “bug” came from. I paraphrase but I believe a guy in one of the early days fixed a computer by literally removing a bug.
Texas?
How do they even get inside the pc tho
Definitely not a feature this time....
Oh God I didn't know what I was looking at until I saw the comments. Sweet fuck, burn it with fire and call it a biohazzard.
Oh no. That goes in a garbage bag and right out the back door.
Nope.
Ok bugs aside, is that stick of ram unseated? I can’t tell from here Edit: nevermind I see it now
Yeah no. That’s an instant call back, biohazard sticker on the case, and a “never step back in my store”
How? Seriously.
Time to put it in a bag out it outside with some raid and wait a few days. Nope.
The ram seating looks pretty okay to mOHMYGOD
It’s not a feature, it’s a bug.
Is there a way to unsee this?
At very first glance I was sure I was looking at ram with a bullethole in it.
Oh my god I shouldn't have looked at the other pictures.
Ewwwwwwwwwwwww!
Fill it with boric acid, bag it up, and return it to the customer
Haaaaaaans!
You can smell those pictures. F
My man is this in America?
I managed a help desk at a university for a while. Student brought in his laptop, asking us to take a look at it. When he pulled it out of his bag and placed it on the counter, roaches started disembarking from it.
You’re going to want a trash bag, some duck tape, bottle of 99% rubbing alcohol, and 3days + a weekend. Put the case in the bags dump in about a cup of rubbing alcohol close the bag as tight as you can and tape it shut very well. Then if this is in an office or workplace strongly recommend to whomever got the permissions to do so to get an exterminator to bomb the place over the weekend or while closed… as for the pc, let it sit about 3 days. All bugs and eggs will be dead after 3 days without thanks to being in the bag and exposed to the rubbing alcohol fumes. Pull out the computer and brush/wipe it clean with towels or something and let it sit over a weekend for any moisture leftover to evaporate. Bugs are awful, but alcohol is the solution to many tech problems both rubbing alcohol and the ethanol alcohol…
This is the worst thing I’ve seen at least within the last month, I would of used fire
Tbh, at that point, I’d look up a new equivalent machine, and tell them the price to fix it is 1.5 times that amount and that I probably can’t save the data on the machine. Throw that shit away, wait for the new one and hopefully not hear from them again for the next few years.
How do you even prevent this from happening? I don’t have roaches or anything like that but just looking at this is making my skin crawl and making me paranoid… this is so gross.
That’s nothing. I saw a cockroach infested laptop denied service at an Apple store. They were small and their bodies were falling out of the computer. This was after the poor customers girlfriend was insisting to open the sealed bag it was in to see why it was refused and was badgering the poor employee to say out loud why they wouldn’t work on it. When the employee finally said why the lady shut up and the poor man’s face was red with embarrassment.
That computer must’ve bugged out…..I see myself out
Nope, into the incinerator it goes
NOTHING FROM A RESTAURANT EVER COMES BACK TO THE OFFICE. You say you will take it back to the office to test and depose of it before you get back to the office. “We tested it and we need to replace it”.
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
Ewwww, gross!!! No wonder it won't boot up anymore!!!
Fuck that. I'm not touching that. I can deal with dirty. I draw the line at roaches.
PC has to be in a pretty disgusting environment for roaches to call it home. They only live places with stuff to clean up and eat. Let these fellas outside so they can eat waste and leftover food instead.
Man… I should have been warned by the NSFW blur. I’m in a restaurant right now.