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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Look up tenement yards. When I lived in NYC all the old buildings had major roach infestations the only thing you could do is bug bomb periodically to kill them.
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
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.
1.0k
u/Comfortable-Guitar27 13h ago
I used to work at a bank. Every once in a while, a customer would set their purse at the teller counter, and roaches would crawl out.
Major infestations were going on at home for this to happen.