Dirty PC Pictures

Even if they don't care about the people who use the mouse out on the floor, they should AT LEAST care about the effort that is required to maintain the floor PCs. Cleaning them out takes too much time. They could probably save enough for a new mouse the first time a cleaning isn't needed when it would have been.

were optical, but because our planner starting ordering mice for us instead of calling IT, previously not an option.

And industry often has a SOP of ordering the cheapest part for less critical (or so the legendary "they" think) part, sometimes the very excuse is that we replace that so much we have to buy the cheapest. DUH.

And probably now that optical mice have been standard for about 5 years, I think they're switching anyway.

But never forget the other mainstay of industry management regarding saving a step like cleaning a mouse. The people having to do it are there anyway, and it only takes a few minutes, they always have some extra time.

I don't know about YOUR place, but at my place the maintenance work on PCs does not cost my office anything. Purchasing a new part DOES cost us. So from my manager's perspective, IT time is free. Anything that adds to the cost of a part is 'real' money.

is normally you call or email the "help desk". They write a ticket if it's not something they can do remotely, and a week later soonest you see someone for non-essential computers, ie, any not belonging to management or directly controlling processes.

Not sure how they get billed for IT time now that even with a couple of people still on site everything goes through off site routing. The people still on site don't actually work for our company of course, but for the contract IT support. They use to work for our company, then basically all got fired from our company and hired by the contracted support company when management decided it wanted to contract it all.

Strictly speaking my experience was with a coin in a printer.

My son was playing with a quarter near his PC one time years ago when he flipped the coin and it went into the out bin of a nearby printer. When he tried to retrieve it the coin dropped down into the printer and lodged against the drum. If memory serves he didn't tell anybody about it for a while. The quarter scratched a line all the way around the drum the next time the printer was used. Even after I replaced the drum, the printer was never quite the same.

Since I've worked for HP many moons ago, I had an interesting problem. The laser printer gave no indication it was bad as well as all the other things normally checked, but it would not print anything, though at times incomplete but perfect output along the edges of normal print field was observed. It was the darnest thing, I finally called in the head tech master guru and only after swapping out the usual parts, etc., came to the conclusion, I wasn't nuts. We found a label normally affixed was loose. When the service door was open it was seemly properly flat but when closed it flipped and laid across the laser path.(blocking it). All the fancy test gear and some spares offered nothing for that issue and/or our tech bible, it was a new one. We forwarded that as an issue to check in future time consuming problems as we felt it could be a rash of badly placed labels or poor glue, what have you.

Then there was the case of "ghost print" on otherwise perfect outputs. The case of the missing "E". The case of the runaway data line printer. I could go on, but alas, those were the days of monster printers and computers that had they're own rooms, yada, yada. Tune in next week for the case of the "walking error that grew feet". adios -----Willy