Caution: This blog contains traces of stupid. Read at own risk

I work at a PC shop. That's a bit of a vague term, and possibly an incorrect one.

To best describe the business, I'd have to call it a "Repair/Retail/Internet Cafè/Scapegoat/Printer/Contractor/Graphic Design/Web Design/Help my internet broke" Shop or Call Center.

I work the typical 9 to 5 shift, and man the shop on my own for 90% of the day.

My boss is on callout for part of the day, and working her other job for another good portion of it.

So yeah… it's a nice little shop. We stock a lot decent retail goods; things like flash drives, keyboards, webcams, speakers, ink, etc…

And of course we do repairs. That's officially my job, though I do everything else too.

Naturally, some of the repairs/requests that customers bring to me are absolutely ludicrous; stressful, but funny when looking back. Here's a couple of anecdotes.

A+ 101: Lubricating your Hard Drive

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So, one day this guy walks into the shop and tells me that one of his HDDs stopped working suddenly.

I asked him what happened prior to the failure. He described to me that he thought it was making too much noise (You know the noise those slightly older IDE drives make when they're reading/writing data), and that he tried to fix it.

Yeah… I asked him how he fixed it.

He "fixed" it… by drilling a hole in the motor casing and putting boat engine grease into the hole.

What I wonder is… why did he even have to ask…

Multi-core processing on the cheap

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Let's keep this short…

Did you know that apparently 1 out of every 2 people in this town cannot legitimately understand why soldering a bunch of processors on top of each other won't work? (And didn't work, in one guy's case).

Bucket Computer

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This one was from today. Around 5 hours ago, to be precise. A guy walks towards the shop with a plastic window-washer's bucket. All I could see in it was a damp looking rag, and I thought he was… well… a window washer, coming to ask if our window needed cleaning (We get a lot of hawkers and such).

Then I saw the power cables coiled on top. That was his 'machine'. The rag was soaked in cooking oil (There's a common myth floating around that submerging or otherwise subjecting your PC to cooking oil will cool it down. It works, but will leave your PC smelling rancid after a while, will leave a slimy residue… and has the potential to build up more heat than you normally would).

Anyway, yeah. Bucket PC. No, it wasn't working. No, he wasn't here to have us repair it… he wanted to sell it to us…

Grease makes things go faster, right?

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Is your computer feeling sluggish? CPU slowing down? Never fear! Just apply a generous coating of engine grease to your RAM, CPU and GPU, and never worry about your computer being slow again!

This is another one I've seen relatively often. Vaseline is another lubricant of choice, and some of them have a spritz bottle of cooking oil they use.

Pro Overclocking

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This one guy… decided that the best way to speed his PC up was to replace each capacitor on the motherboard with the same high-voltage ones found in PSUs.

According to him, this was 'overclocking'.

Oh, I should probably mention that in all of these encounters, the customer proudly explains their methodology (And shattered logic), then ask "So why isn't it working?".

This is why I'm on anti-anxiety medication…

"I made it fit, so why doesn't it work?"

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I encounter, and replace, several varieties of RAM chips, the most common being the DDR2 variety.

But what happens when somebody decides that DDR/SIMM/Whatever ought to fit in <insert slot here>.

One sharp/abrasive implement and a trip to Your Friendly Computer shop later, and I'm again hearing the "So why isn't it working?" line…

This also happens on occasion with AGP/PCI-E graphics cards, and processors.

Well that's enough of that for now

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Writing these is both funny and depressing. Depressing because I'm actually having to deal with this on a near-daily basis.

But hey, at least I get paid for it. :P

In other work-related news…

I have an old Pentium sitting around, fully intact. In fact, the inside of the case is the cleanest PC I've ever seen. Slight layer of dust, but the board (A 1996 Intel board), is still shiny and clean.

Naturally, the machine is, for all practical purposes, pretty useless. That's no deterrent to me. My boss has approved a long term project wherein we install DOS or Win98 on the thing, buy some joysticks and a coin box from a company in Cape Town, and build an Arcade Cabinet; Old versions of MAME run pretty well on old hardware :P

We're also planning on moving two of our machines near the front of the shop, on a long bench-table. These particular machines have a few free games installed (Red Eclipse, for instance), and a few classics (Doom, Quake, Quake 2, Unreal Tournament).

Not many people stop by to use our internet services… but we're literally right next to a school/high-school, and hordes of the undead little buggers walk past our doors every day.

We plan on setting up a few LAN tournaments with small prizes; those machines are our 'base' machines, and they can bring their own.

If that gets big enough, we might plan a bigger tournament at the town hall; my boss is a trained event planner/coordinator, and we could potentially make a pretty big deal out of it :P

On a completely different tangent…

Objects of interesting lying around our shop:

> An old Yamaha XG sound card. In working condition.

> An ancient scanner. It's the size of a big office printer, though flatter, yet it can only scan A4 pages (At around 80DPI).

> Mount Oki. For some reason, we have a pile of discarded OKI printers in the back of the shop.

> 22 3 1/2 inch floppy drives. Am tempted to make a robot out of them.

> 8 CRT monitors, some of them are huge. Am planning on using one of them in conjunction with one of our crappy webcams to make a monitoring system of sorts.

Well, that's enough outta me. I'll probably have tons more stories in a few weeks. Things get pretty crazy at work, with great regularity…