Imagine a well-intentioned but utterly clueless engineer wielding a welding shop air hose as a PC cleaning tool. Spoiler alert: it didn’t end well. Welcome to another edition of On Call, The Register’s weekly dive into the wild world of tech support tales, where chaos often reigns and heroes emerge from the most unexpected places.
This week, we’re revisiting a story shared by a reader we’ll affectionately call 'Wilson,' who once oversaw a welding shop attached to an engineering consultancy. Wilson sets the stage by transporting us back to the early 1980s, a time when AutoCAD was revolutionizing the industry, replacing traditional drawing boards. It was an era of transition, and not everyone was handling it gracefully.
Enter a newly hired structural engineer, whom Wilson and his colleagues quickly dubbed 'an idiot with a degree.' This engineer, despite his credentials, seemed to lack even the most basic understanding of technology. One fateful day, he decided that the computers running AutoCAD were in dire need of cleaning—and the welding shop, of all places, was his chosen battleground.
But here’s where it gets controversial: instead of using a can of compressed air designed for electronics, he grabbed the welding shop’s air hose. Wilson explains that this wasn’t your average air supply. 'It operates at 90 PSI and is a mix of 80 percent air, 15 percent water, and 5 percent oil,' he notes. When the engineer unleashed this concoction on the PCs, the results were catastrophic. Memory chips and other components were blasted right off the motherboards, leaving the machines in ruins.
And this is the part most people miss: despite the obvious damage, our misguided engineer doubled down. He didn’t stop at one PC—oh no. He 'cleaned' all five of them. Wilson recalls the absurdity of watching him attempt to salvage the situation, scrubbing steel grinding dust and dirt off loose parts with a rag soaked in acetone. Predictably, none of the computers survived, and the company was forced to replace them.
The fallout was immediate. Valuable engineering files were lost, and the senior engineer was, in Wilson’s words, 'ready to kill him.' The final straw came a few months later when the engineer deleted AutoCAD from his computer to free up space for a game. He was promptly shown the door.
Here’s the real head-scratcher: Wilson later learned that this same engineer landed a job at a major US-based aircraft company. It raises the question: how do individuals with such questionable judgment end up in critical roles? And more importantly, how can we prevent such disasters from happening in the first place?
Have you ever witnessed a well-meaning but disastrously misguided attempt at tech maintenance? We want to hear your stories! Click here to share your tales of tech destruction, and who knows—your story might just make it into a future edition of On Call. ®
