Computer Technicians Share The Most Bizarre Things They've Found On A Customer's Computer
Ever wonder what the weirdest things computer technicians stumble across on a client's computer?
HeiroglyphicFad asked, Computer technicians what's the most bizarre thing that you have found on a customers computer?
Submissions have been edited for clarity, context, and profanity.
Apparently, he was f_cking serious.
I have a buddy who works IT. One of the best stories he has ever shared was about a person who didn't know there was an eject button for floppy disks and ended up pouring liquid butter into the disk drive so that he could lubricate it enough to rip it out with a pair of pliers. As the guy was explaining all this, my friend snatched the floppy from his hand and popped it into the drive. The guy immediately started freaking out since it took him like two hours to pry the fucker out. My friend just hit the eject button and stood there holding the floppy disk right in front of his face as the guy looked back and forth between the disk and the computer like "...Are you f_cking serious?"
Important, quality content.
User departing the firm, recent manager in her late twenties, asks to retrieve her personal images. She traveled a lot to tropical places and had an entire folder dedicated to candid photos of guys in swimsuits.
Laptops + rain = fail.
I do IT support for a school and had a teacher call me one day as 17 of the Laptops the students use all stopped working at the same time, the teacher claimed that we must have rolled out an update that had broken all the machines so was irate that we fix what we did now!! As she couldn't teach without them.
Only when I got ahold of the Laptops which did I learn the teacher had them all working outside on a rainy day studying weather etc.
To each their own I suppose.
Soooooo much hentai. Hentai desktop, hentai videos, hentai games, hentai manga, hentai pictures. He brought it in because he thought he had a virus. I was polite and didn't really react or say anything when I first saw the desktop wallpaper. I still can't believe somebody can be so nonchalant about such a massive porn collection.
This is just impressive.
This was back in the late '90s and the dude had a folder marked "Jerks, Douchebags, and A**holes" so I had some free time and investigated. He literally kept files on every piece of celebrity misconduct he unearthed. Thanks to him, I learned John Lennon beat his wife way ahead of everyone else.
Mud. In a laptop that supposedly treated normally. Okurrrr
Mud. A student brought in a laptop that wouldn't power on. I removed the bottom of the laptop and found a thin layer of mud in it. The student couldn't provide any explanation as to why it was there of course, because she swore she treated just as she was supposed to.
Grab the Purell...
One of my older customers had a saved bookmark for 'Dungeon porn'. The laptop was always overly greasy. Went through a bottle of hand sanitizer every time I delt with him
No.
The absolute worst was when I was at my first job. I was around 16 and worked with an older 21-year-old girl who was teaching me a lot. One day a customer walks in with an old PC that looked heavy, I took it to the back of the store and went back to the customer to ask a few questions when we suddenly hear my coworker scream really loud. There was a cockroach but it didn't look normal, look up a Madagascar cockroach and ugh, disgusting thing but whatever killed it and moved on with work. A few minutes later there was another one but we couldn't figure out where they were coming from until we opened the PC and we found it infested, there was this huge nest of them...
Still have nightmares about it, disgusting.
I'd have cut it off at the dolls. Creeper level: Jedi.
- Thousands of photographs of creepy dolls. Like, tens of thousands, and of different creepy dolls;
- Hundreds of tiny postage-stamp sized pictures of women's toes. (Assuming female toes; they all had scarlet-red toenail polish.)r;
- Enough bookmarks to white supremacy and anti-Semitic sites to choke a Clydesdale;
- Several hundred GB (back when disk space wasn't cheap at all) of gay porn. It's bizarre only because the person that owned the PC was loud, virulently anti-gay. (Obviously, later, I realized he was one of those self-hating types -- he later did come out, but when I found the files it was a serious WTF moment. Especially since it was on a work pc.)
When you find evidence of a murder...
I've got a good story for this one. Not something I found on a customers computer so much as the events surrounding the situation. Years ago, in my consulting days, a customer brought in two desktops. They were covered in dirt; Inside, outside, everywhere. It looked like someone had literally shoveled dirt into them. He was pretty blunt about what happened: he said his wife had been having pretty explicit chat sessions with some guy on the internet.
In a rage, he took his and her computers out and buried them in the backyard. He then thought better about it and brought them to us in hopes of having them fixed. That was pretty much the last time we saw him. We cleaned both workstations up and actually managed to salvage them. They sat on the shelf for a good year and a half waiting for their owner to come pick them up, but he never came.
We eventually disposed of them since they had been there for a long time and repeated attempts to contact the guy had failed. One day, probably about 2 years after the guy showed up and 6 months after we had scrapped his pc's, a couple deputies from the local sheriff's office showed up with a warrant to seize his equipment; which we no longer had possession of. They were surprisingly unconcerned when I told them we didn't have it.
Turned out his wife had "disappeared" and when the guy was questioned about it he confessed to killing her. They found her buried in his backyard.
Ahhh, the pain Olympics.
From a friend who was working in a computer shop a few years ago. Guy had an issue with his computer running slow. My friend looks through it, discovered there's a fair number of movies (I hesitate to call it porn) on the guy's machine.
Oh yeah?
We once had a couple that came in. They were rude a**hats to us and completely whiny that their repair might take up to three days (we were a busy repair shop). The husband was the worst. He screamed at us that he ran a business and yaddayaddayadda. Anyway, we end up having to restore their computer because it's just riddled with infections and we want it up and running as quick as possible. They have 2 locked user accounts. Wife has... maybe 500mb of pictures and documents, mostly business related. Her husband? 320gigs in a secret folder named affectionately "gay porn." In the interest of time, when we set up their restored windows we set up just 1 user account: Admin. And dumped everything on the desktop.
Why tf would you store everythi... you know what it's best not to ask.
I learned that emptying the trash is a bad idea after working on the computer of a person who stored literally everything in Trash.
Just... how?!
A guy who didn't speak English brought his computer into me. It wouldn't turn on. Like any regular repair tech, I popped open the side cover of his desktop to find a fried roach on his board. I'm not a squeamish person by any means so I pointed to it. Funny thing was, about 50 more crawled out of every nook and cranny on the board at that point. I slammed the cover back on and handed the PC back to him. He looked at me confused so all I could think to say was: "El fuego???????."
Is consultant-client privilege a thing? It certainly should be.
Work as a consultant, CEOs computer who we knew very well, was a client for years, beautiful wife and family. Mounds of gay porn. He used to bring in his computer at least once a month [due] to viruses. Every time we would back everything up and reformat. We always [put] the gay porn in a folder called "\__ stuff" in my documents. He knew we knew. We knew he knew we knew. Probably one of the reasons they were our client so long.
Pretty sure this counts as sexual harassment, but ok
I set up a webcam for a guy. The next day he brings it back in saying it never worked, except when I opened the webcam application there were about 25 stills of his junk, I also noticed when he came back in to get it he was wearing the same shirt he was wearing in the pics. Needless to say, the camera worked fine, I think he just wanted someone to see his junk.