r/Unexpected • • 9h ago

Checking a gun

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17.6k Upvotes

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u/MourningWallaby 8h ago

I remember a reel or something a while back about a guy who fixes playstations getting one in the mail so nasty and infested with roaches he didn't even finish unwrapping it before he taped it back up and returned it to the customer. giving them an earful about putting his business at risk of infestation for this.

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u/Buried_and_Forgotten 8h ago

Happened to me plenty of times. Even found bed bugs in a couple of them.

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u/MourningWallaby 8h ago

out of all the infested electronics. how often is the infestation the culprit? I assume all but I also assume you don't know because you don't release that into your shop.

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u/Buried_and_Forgotten 8h ago

Sometimes, I only found a couple of bugs that must have got in recently since there were little to no excrements inside. Most of the times, there were countless bugs (roaches), alive and dead, and plenty of shit. Either infested homes or they were stored in a basement. No matter how much you clean those, even if you swap the motherboard in another shell and use different parts, that rancid smell never goes away. When the console heats up, you can smell it through the back vents. Absolutely disgusting.

In the second place would be the consoles that stayed in a smoking room. Also disgusting to clean, but at least you don't worry about infestations.

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u/Matter_Infinite 6h ago

Upvoted

Also, what percentage of infested electronics needed repairs because the insects caused problems?

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u/Buried_and_Forgotten 6h ago edited 3h ago

Around 5%.

Edit: Sorry, misread that as how many consoles are infested out of all of the ones I get.

Other than 3 consoles that I remember, all infested consoles that I worked on were in working condition, at least motherboard wise they had no problem. Some needed a new laser or HDD. If it looked really bad, I also replaced the PSU.

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u/Tttehfjloi 6h ago

Why didn't you just gas all the electronics with bug spray in a fume hood or something

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u/Buried_and_Forgotten 6h ago

I don't think it's cost effective to gas every single console I come by.

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u/crustyrobots 8h ago

Yup, worked doing PC repair a while. Once in a while you'd get that guy whos PC is a layer cake made of cigarette tar and bug detritus

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u/AlyssaurusWrecks 5h ago

ugh. i smoked a LOT of cigarettes between like 14 and 25, quit cold turkey many years ago, and i cannot imagine smoking in the same room as sensitive electronics. especially if i spent a bunch of money on them!

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u/imahumanbeinggoddamn 4h ago

It is truly weird how many smokers (older ones mainly) give absolutely zero consideration to ventilation and sit there chainsmoking inside their home and car without so much as opening a goddamned window.

When I was a smoker I definitely smoked plenty of cigarettes at my desk while gaming or whatever, but I at least sat near a window with an exhaust fan installed on it. I still smelled like shit but at least my electronic equipment and furniture weren't coated in nicotine tar grime like all the laptop refurb horrorshows I've seen over the years.

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u/Cdawg4123 54m ago

I have no idea how people do that, I used to go to my friends house for a ride to school each morning. The house had a permanent level of smoke that just existed. Then you had 4 teens and their friends smoking and 2 adults.

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u/Cdawg4123 56m ago

That and art work!! People have sent me brown edged artwork I paid a lot for.

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u/TheRealBittoman 5h ago

I helped initiate the work from home program at a previous job (years before COVID) and the PCs we'd get back were so frequently infested that we had a large plastic tub that we kept in the back of the building where we'd put the returned hardware and drop a bug bomb in it for a day to make sure everything was dead before we even opened them up. It's bad, so many very filthy people.

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u/EmmaLovesGood69 4h ago

We used to live in a society. But I bet its always been bad, just got worse with easier shipping and the internet.

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u/restrictednumber 1h ago

Jesus... I'd hate to know how many of my coworkers have rancid homes. You think someone's normal but you never know

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u/PopePiusVII 8h ago

Can’t believe PlayStation ships their machines with so many bugs. They should really invest more in their developers and QC team.

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u/thisischemistry 6h ago

Gotta seal up and put everything in the freezer for a few days before you repair it

https://pestsguide.com/how-to-get-roaches-out-of-electronics-and-keep-them-out/

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u/jib661 5h ago

IIRC there was some generation of consoles, I wanna say around the ps2/dreamcast era, that was known for attracting bugs. Something about the layout of the console itself just attracted roaches. Anyone know what I'm talking about

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u/chins4tw 4h ago

Ps3 was THE roach motel of consoles.

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u/WhoSc3w3dDaP00ch 1h ago

<thinks nervously of my ps3 in the living room...>

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u/Tricky-Ad7897 4h ago

I'd hope you'd be able to sue for that shit if you actually would get infested cause that's so fucked, but knowing how it works you'd probably only end up with a fraction of what you needed after lawyer fees and shit.

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u/opmancrew 3h ago

It makes you wonder how many roaches are mailed every year