Your Mac accidents

2 boneheaded mistakes:

1 - decided to use some app off versiontracker to remove the extra language packs and regains ome space...
I chose a bad option, and rendered my keyboard useless. luckily I'd run a full backup the previous night. reinstalled from scratch and all was well again.

2 - somehow the powerbrick cord connected to my wife's 12" pb got tangled just enough, around my foot. I went to walk away and pulled it onto the hard wood floor. partially caught it, but it bent the plug that goes INTO the pb (the plug's no good now). pb's ok, small dent next to the power port, but it works fine still. whew! my wife's first reaction, "You'd have killed me if I did that to your powerbook!" Yeah, I felt REALLY bad about it..
 
Story 6

Just a couple of weeks ago my nephew knocked over a glass of water directly onto the same iBook mentioned in story 5. my sister-in-law immediately picked it up and unplugged the power and so on, but the water ran out of the thing when she tipped it on the side. my sister-in-law said that she heard it sizzling when she first picked it up. My brother soaked up as much as he could from every accessable place and let it sit for several days. it has been working fine since.

Story 7

I pulled this same nephew (when he was about 25ish pounds) off of the computer a long time ago. it was left closed in the corner of the room. he was standing directly on the top of the computer. there was no damage to it that time either.
 
I used my G1 iPod like crazy during college to carry all my information and music around. Problem was that I plugged and unplugged the firewire cord so many times that the soddering came loose and the iPod wouldn't charge or transfer files/songs without pushing the plug one way or another. Barely managed to get all the info off of it, that is just before the HD on the B&W G3 tower went! Lost most of my data and am still trying to recover as much as I can of the data that I did pull off the dead drive. Let this be a lesson: don't keep important info on a heavily used portable device and make backups often!

Second story: I once was witness to a guy bringing in a PC laptop (forget what brand) into CompUSA to have fixed/repaired. Apparently, he left his laptop on the floor open next to the bed and when the alarm clock that was across the room went off in the morning, he stepped on the laptop and crunched both the keyboard/parts underneath and put a huge splinter crack in the screen (akin to what one would see if the windshield of a car were to get cracked by a rouge pebble). He had to pay to have basicly the entire system fixed.


P.S. all the horror stories about liquids being spilled on Power/iBooks just justifies my personal rule for NEVER having any sort of liquid near my PB.
 
Oh well.. most of the time I eat and drink in front of a Mac .. at least at work, and home... Imagine 3-4 people in front of a kitchen table, all attached to their 'Books... so far lucky, ... :)
 
I work for an apple dealer in the UK below I have listed two interesting accidents.

No: 1

Going back a few years a client brought in a Mac SE30 that had been dropped in the bath. Turns out she was having a party and someone filled up the bath and dropped the mac in it.

When the client found the machine submerged in the bath she pulled it out and plugged it in to the mains to see if was ok (Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!) The lights went out end of party.

After drying out the Mac SE30 in the workshop the only thing that had to be replaced was the HD and the Floppy Drive.

No: 2

Another client came in telling me his floppy drive was faulty, after catching his son sticking a knife in the floppy drive, he had to pay in cash due to his son losing his credit cards.

We replaced the drive, later on that week I went to send the faulty unit back to Apple, as I was boxing the fdhd up out dropped his credit cards.

No: 3

A client left his iPod G1 on the roof of his car pulled off and as he was driving heard the iPod slide across his roof and watched it hit the road in his rear view mirrorr.

He pulled over and ran back to reclaim the unit by this time it had been run over by a few more cars, reclaimed the unit as you can imagine it didn't look to health.

It still worked the LCD was smashed and the case was falling apart.
 
At work we have cubicles. On the tops of some cubicle walls are little shelves holding plants.

One day the play lady came by to water the plants. When she got to my neighbor's cube she overshot the plant and instead watered his monitor. The monitor instantly sparked and let up a plume of smoke.

The monitor was dead, but lucklily the Mac 7200 it was sitting on survived.
 
mindbend said:
I was in a car "incident" once where a dog ran out in front of me so I slammed on the brakes and my Power Tower Pro 225 was thrown into the dashboard. (I had been carting it back and forth from work to home). Once at work, I realized it wouldn't boot, so I opened her up and started playing around. Turns out the whole box had ben knocked out of whack so the PCI slots were off kilter. With a bit of nudging a hammering, I got it more less back in shape and everything worked again.
Click to expand...
Please tell me you did not litereally use a hammer?
 
mdnky said:
...Spilled a full bottle of Budweiser on top of the desktop once...the first time I ever saw OS X stumble. It was fine the next morning though...
Click to expand...
That was Mac OS X's subtle way of criticizing your choice of beer. Stick to Micro-Brews and OS X won't get so snotty.

;)

mdnky said:
...Same beige desktop was in my last car when some kid pulled out in front of me...got launched from the backseat into the front against the dash..
Click to expand...
Several people here have mentioned sudden car stops.

I've been laughed at for this, but when I transport my computers I absolutely DO use the seatbelt to secure them. It works!
 
Tommy green tea would work even better ... seen 2 Powerbooks not die on having been soaked on green tea. (No sugar though). :D
 
I noticed that a bottle is much more secure if you are drinking in front of a computer. First, if it falls the bottle has to be at a certain (larger) degree in order to spill it's content. This will give you more time to react and catch it. Secondly not that much is spilled 'cause of the thinner bottle neck. It became my second nature to close the lid of the bottle if it is in an area with electronic devices.
 
just put a full glass of Orange juice over my powerbook keyboard :(
pulled everything out. tilted it to get the most out of the machine (not because i was thirsty, i might add). well i'm writing on it now, but the spacebar is sticky as hell.
 
Decado said:
just put a full glass of Orange juice over my powerbook keyboard :(
pulled everything out. tilted it to get the most out of the machine (not because i was thirsty, i might add). well i'm writing on it now, but the spacebar is sticky as hell.
Click to expand...

Something similar happened to me as well. I spilled Chocolate Milk all over my ibook keyboard a while back... It was interesting to say the least. I removed all the keys and cleaned each one individually. It took 2 hours but it works fine now... no stickiness or anything.. I highly suggest you do the same. Ohh and be warned that if you do, you'll probably be grossed out to see what lives in your keyboard..
 
Decado said:
just put a full glass of Orange juice over my powerbook keyboard :(
pulled everything out. tilted it to get the most out of the machine (not because i was thirsty, i might add). well i'm writing on it now, but the spacebar is sticky as hell.
Click to expand...

Something similar happened to me as well. I spilled Chocolate Milk all over my ibook keyboard a while back... It was interesting to say the least. I removed all the keys and cleaned each one individually. It took 2 hours but it works fine now... no stickiness or anything.. I highly suggest you do the same. Ohh and be warned that if you do, you'll probably be grossed out to see what lives in your keyboard..

for details on how I did this, I followed the steps detailed here: http://mij.oltrelinux.com/ibook/cleaning_keyboard/
 
ok, another one:

i had made my bed about 3 meters up in the air in my room to save space.
one morning me and my girlfriend woke up, and in a goodmorning-hug we accidentally turned to much to the edge.. and fell all the way down, right on top of my desk, which had a beige G3 on it. from there we role off the desk, taking everything on it with us, down to the floor.
the scanner and printer didn't servive. one monitor had collapsed. and the Beige G3 didn't really look as if it were ever to run again: the case was cracked and bended, and opened during the crash. all front-panels had come off.. etc..

but after bending-back pices, reassembling everythjing and pressing the powerbutton: TADAAAAA.. it still works perfect today.

and most important, we didn't get hurt ourselves either.
some angels around i guess

arri
 
xarcom said:
Something similar happened to me as well. I spilled Chocolate Milk all over my ibook keyboard a while back... It was interesting to say the least. I removed all the keys and cleaned each one individually. It took 2 hours but it works fine now... no stickiness or anything.. I highly suggest you do the same. Ohh and be warned that if you do, you'll probably be grossed out to see what lives in your keyboard..

for details on how I did this, I followed the steps detailed here: http://mij.oltrelinux.com/ibook/cleaning_keyboard/
Click to expand...


just cleaned my keyboard in a fit of work-avoiding.

small, crap-making little creatures have obviously been very productive in the last six months.... hideous.
 
arri said:
ok, another one:

i had made my bed about 3 meters up in the air in my room to save space.
one morning me and my girlfriend woke up, and in a goodmorning-hug we accidentally turned to much to the edge.. and fell all the way down, right on top of my desk, which had a beige G3 on it. from there we role off the desk, taking everything on it with us, down to the floor.
the scanner and printer didn't servive. one monitor had collapsed. and the Beige G3 didn't really look as if it were ever to run again: the case was cracked and bended, and opened during the crash. all front-panels had come off.. etc..

but after bending-back pices, reassembling everythjing and pressing the powerbutton: TADAAAAA.. it still works perfect today.

and most important, we didn't get hurt ourselves either.
some angels around i guess

arri
Click to expand...

stranger than fiction... couldn't make it up!
 
Well, this is more of an OS 9, older program accident.

I have a Motorola StarMax with both OS 9 and Debian installed. I decided to reboot from Linux to OS 9 so that my son could play "Mixed Up Mother Goose" on it. Well, things went well until the computer COMPLETELY locked up. I actually had to hit the power button on the StarMax and noticed that BootX gave me an error saying it couldn't find the partition with the Linux kernel. So I let it boot into OS 9 and noticed that the partition wasn't there. A quick klaunch of the Disk First Aid brought it back up, but it has errors.

Lesson learned: never again will I play old 68k games on the StarMax, no matter what my son says. :p
 
nice, Xarcom!
but the powerbooks keyboard looks quite different, so i wonder if the same instruction applies to it. Anyone?
i will try to keep away from the computer for a few days (Ghhaaaa!) to see if it gets solved by drying the stuck juice to powder.
 
I've seen a Titanium PowerBook tumble down 15 cement steps. No damage. Works perfect, and it was even on sleep :confused:. It didnt even wake up when it hit the bottom.

Well it dosent involve damage, but I accidently deleted the calculator.app on my Mac :eek::p. ElDiablo helped me get it back:).
 
Powerbook is different, right kallikanzaroi ... it's harder to remove the keyboard. You'd need to lift the keys f2 or f3 and f11 or f12 (around them - I don't remember offhand which) so that you could lift the keyboard .. and in a specific way and specific angle -- as it's not planned to be a user removable part. I think letting the pbook dry a few days to see if it would eliminate the problem might work as well. At least, try that before trying to see what else you can (unless you find the service manual etc).
 
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