#816 – Thermal

Where I work all the computers are purchased with the understanding that they are to be in service for 5 years before being replaced. When you get hired, whatever computer happens to be at your desk is the one you are stuck with. Your computer won’t be upgraded until it passes the 5 year mark, or you misplace your sandwich inside it. Whichever comes first.

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27 thoughts on “#816 – Thermal”

  1. Ray A. says:

    I’ve found that putting an Eggo waffle into the CD-RW does wonders.

    Also, all hail the return of the Swiss Army Ergonomic Chair! That thing seems to gain more knobs and levers each time …

  2. Space Butler says:

    Biff seems too prepared. I’m willing to bet that he was overclocking it or covering up the vents.

  3. Shorty says:

    I’m not so sure Biff’s coworkers appreciate the situation as much as he does.

  4. MaskedMan says:

    PB & J sandwiches work best, IME.

    I hope The Chair of Insanity doesn’t have any power connections, or Biff is in for a rude shock…

  5. Nicoli20 says:

    Biff’s coworkers were also probably wondering why he was wearing swim shorts to work until now.

  6. Drakey says:

    “Oh, darnadoodles, I’ve gona and lost my sandwich again! Seems to happen every year! And right about the time they come out with teh slick new computers. So expensive! Oh well, might as well get a new one!”

  7. Greyryder says:

    And, when IT wants to know how the sandwich got inside the computer, just tell them it was in an email.

  8. Nilly says:

    Sounds like the computers at school. Our one teacher, Mrs. Smith, essentially owns the SUCCESS Lab (as she’s bought everything for that room, new computers and all, on her salary) and she’s basically sick of having to buy new things for the computers because people don’t know how to take care of the things (breaking the keyboards, unplugging computers, theft of mice balls. Yes, some computers have ball mice.). So now there’s tiny cameras everywhere in the computer lab area…

  9. Chris says:

    @Greyryder – Ha!

  10. i.half4 says:

    @ Ray A: JA be left to be dittohead: Yay! Swiss Army chair.

    @ Masked Man: But commander Powell wouldn’t mind the company?
    (a DARK STAR reference, F’ Y’alls Info’)

  11. Bobzone says:

    Banana in disk drive error.

    (Hehe, I love the chair!)

  12. Mophtran says:

    Biff: *Opens CD Drive* Ah, this must be the sandwich warmer!

  13. ZeoViolet says:

    No, it’s the bologna storage unit.

  14. sco3tt says:

    So if you pull that one bent knob while you turn that other one . . . GOD NO, NOT THAT ONE! Oh, too late, sorry about the spleen, dude.

    “Hello tech support? I broke my pc when it stuck it’s tongue out at me. cd writer? What the heck is a cd writer?”

  15. MaskedMan says:

    @i.half4;
    Heh! I wonder what advice Biff wold give on talking to the Bomb?

    @ZeoViolet;
    You win.
    😀

    @sco3tt;
    First runner-up.
    :p

  16. Ziggy Stardust says:

    Many times, I have SO wanted to commit acts of violence upon my school’s computers. SO SLOW, and half of them are broken or corrupted by freshmen who only regularly use them for checking MySpace. “Teacher, it isn’t turning on! I tried unplugging this thingy and it started doing the blinky thingy and now it’s black. Teacher!”

  17. madmule says:

    uggghhh i was one of the techs for my highschool and we had a hell of a time keeping them all running in some sort of order till we got the new computers

  18. Radical Edward says:

    My computer has died on me not that long ago. I ended up getting a similar model.

  19. T3ch W01f says:

    @ Ziggy Stardust

    The whole myspace thing corrupting computers is a myth perpetuated by schools to clear up internet bandwith that really isn’t used unless kids are on myspace anyways.

    When I was in highschool my senior year, they myspace was just getting huge and thus to “conserve” bandwidth and keep our precious computers from being corrupted by that virus feel trojan laden myspace it had to be blocked through the schools filtering system. I was the kid that ran around teaching everyone how to use web proxies to still access myspace while the school was proclaiming our bandwidth was now free to be used for academic purposes and it was safe once again to use jump drives and floppy disks on the computers because they were 100% clean now that no one could access myspace. Even though we were all still using myspace.

    You can get bugs any where you go on the internet if you don’t have a good AV, but if you have a good AV your computer is practically idiot proof. Plenty of good free AV’s out there too.

  20. kingbob says:

    im the guy who would always be renaming everything on the start menu with gibberish copy-pasted from system files i opened in notepad. i also once crashed an entire lab with a virus i dled from some site

  21. AdmiralChaos says:

    I recall one day we had a substitute in my high school programming class… We were playing armagetron (motorcycles that lay walls down) with the 16 people in class, and then decided to try 256 simultaneous users…eventually the IT tech wandered in laughing because we were using most of the entire school district’s bandwidth for our dedicated server.

    Also…heat guns are very, very great ways to break a computer without leaving a trace 🙂

  22. Claude says:

    New reader here and really digging the strip. It took me two days to go through all the archives.

    My favorite prank is to take a screen shot of the desktop and then set it as the wallpaper, then delete the icons. It’s riotous good fun watching people clicking repeatedly on an image that won’t respond.

  23. Ziggy Stardust says:

    @T3ch W01f
    My comment really didn’t have anything to do with Myspace or bandwidth- I just don’t like freshmen. I don’t like using the school’s computers either… I am pretty uniformed on the AV front at my school. Also, since we got new computers in one of the labs, we have no floppy drives- and there were not any on the laptops to begin with.
    Is it worth noting that I would not waste a perfectly good sammich by putting it in a CD/DVD writer/drive?

  24. gelugon2105 says:

    That PC is ruined.

  25. dartigen says:

    Heh. Our school has two-year-old computers that mostly get the CD-drive tray replaced – people like to a) superglue them shut or b) rip them out entirely.
    The theft of the mouse balls was why we switched to optical mice….so now people stick tape over the little transmitter thingy. Keyboard keys are often switched. My computer in my IT class has two Q keys. The second one is where the C should be. Lucky that I don’t look half the time when I am typing.

    Of course, nobody ever thinks of remapping the keyboard…if only I had an admin password.

  26. -2! says:

    Ah school days… I remember back at my school the IT guy was the laziest person and I had crafted a deal where I fix there broken software and help them with computer trobles and me and my friend get to play my game on there computers (yes it is my game I made it which was a key loophole as we were “testing”) I still remember the time someone stole the F1 key from the keyboard (normally not a big deal as who uses help right? but my main programing language I used back then had F1 as run) So I put the scroll lock key there.

    I cant remember how many ways i got by the system, mainly to change the resolution from 800*600 so you could, you know use the Internet (or my game)

  27. Hershey says:

    I hate my school’s system of blocking things.
    You’d get online, and once in a while, find a website they’ve never heard of so it isn’t blocket. Good fun. You’re shooting virtual people while everyone else tries to type sentences and asks you ” Dude, whats that? Gimme the url. ”
    But then the school district or whomever checks the history of your computers and blocks every website you weren’t supposed to be on.
    We came up with the idea of deleting out history list only after everywhere good was blocked.

    heh, I kept my first computer for five years.
    It began spazzing out horridly all the weight back at four years. But I kept using it.

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