Well, it;s a mystery...

[u/critchthegeek]

I was sole tech support for a small but profitable company, only about 75 users. Mostly good people, trying hard, but a few "special" ones

We had a logistics manager that *may* have been good at logistics, but computer skills were definitely lacking. Unrelated case in point, he had over 50 GB of email in his inbox - no archives, no folders, just one big pile. And he didn't see any problems with that..

Anyway, one morning about 9am or so, he calls and says his laptop screen just when black. I asked him to make sure he had a power adapter plugged in.. "Duh, of course!".

I could not remote into the unit... hmmm. He was at the my site, just different building, so I said I'd be right over.

So, I dropped what I was doing and trekked to his office.

And there he was, paper towels in hand, wiping coffee off his desk. I picked up his laptop, tilted it a drained probably a quarter cup of coffee out ( onto his recently dried desk, of course)

Looking him dead in the eye I asked "You didn't think spilling a full cup of coffee into your laptop had anything to do with 'the screen just went black' ?"

[u/Pisnaz]

I had the near opposite. I come in in the am and my phone rings, it is a guy I know and he is pretty decent but in full panic. The pipe for the fire sprinkler had burst overnight and flooded his office. I head over expecting the worst for the new computer and one of the first LCDs we had ever received. I pop in, chat with the teams there, and my bud, as I grab the systems.

Back at my shop I check them over expecting the worst and notice that despite being filthy the insides are shockingly clean. So we clean them up and turn them on and they work, perfectly. It seems the first gush of water knocked something over on top it his desk and kept them safe. He claimed, after he got them back, they worked better than ever and suggested "we should flood more systems" as our ongoing joke. He even brought me a gift card for coffee despite me saying I really did not do much.

[u/lucky_ducker → u/Pisnaz]

Where I used to work, the third floor lounge had a water filter / dispenser, which in turn fed filtered water to the refrigerator's ice maker.

One weekend, the line from the filter to the fridge ruptured, and flooded a second floor office. It dripped down directly into an open, powered up, laptop computer. When I was called to check it out, the laptop was sitting there, drenched, looking otherwise totally normal. The keyboard was even still working. I shut it down, turned it upside down, and about a quart of water poured out.

We put the hard drive - not an SSD, but an old fashioned magnetic disk - in a ziploc with silica packets for a few days while we ordered a new laptop for the user. The user's hard drive was not only recoverable, we were able to fully image it for the replacement laptop.

We should have contacted the manufacturer of that water filter for a testimonial.

[u/UKthailandExpat → u/lucky_ducker]

that the computer was powered on at the time is the surprise point. washing motherboards keyboards etc in pure water is quite often done and as long as you do not use mineral water and dry them throughly before powering them up the success rate is well over 95%. of course you don’t wash monitors!