Magnet master

[Hitokiri Akins]

Okay, this happened to a friend of mine who worked at Dell CS for a while.

A woman calls her up and complains that files are disappearing from her computer. Well, my friend runs through her checklist and then starts doing some real troubleshooting; "Did you run your antivirus?" "Have you renamed any file extensions?" And the like. Finally, she gets to the dreaded "crack your computer open and check to see if everything is connected properly". The woman says, "Hold on, my refrigerator magnets are making it difficult." My friend is like, "Refrigerator magnets?" And the customer is like, "Yeah, I keep all kinds of magnets on my computer. It makes it look pretty....Is that a problem?" Needless to say, my friend was exasperated.

I lost it when she told me this story, because I magnetically wiped hard drives when I was in the Air Force and during college. It just boggles my mind how someone could think that putting fridge magnets on a computer is a good idea.

Oh, and if this has been posted elsewhere by someone else, than I am sorry. But these kind of things happen all over, and there are stupid people all over, as this site can attest to.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

I've said it before and I'll say it again:

There needs to be a mandatory IQ test one must pass in order to own or use a computer.

[joe hx]

The woman says, "Hold on, my refrigerator magnets are making it difficult." My friend is like, "Refrigerator magnets?" And the customer is like, "Yeah, I keep all kinds of magnets on my computer. It makes it look pretty....Is that a problem?"

i always wondered if refridgerator magnets were strong enough, but never stupid enough to try...

[Bandit]

Used to be the quickest way to erase floppy disks was to put them under one of the old, analogue phones and make the phone ring.

Nothing says "Factory Fresh" for a 5.25" disk like 96 VAC going through some electro-mechanical bells.

B

[jerkface11]

I doubt regular rubber fridge magnets would be powerful enough to hurt anything. They won't even pick up a paperclip thru a sheet of paper. I'm not going to stick them on my computer to find out though.

[Ironclad Alibi]

I doubt regular rubber fridge magnets would be powerful enough to hurt anything.

One or two might not do anything, but apparently she had a lot of them on there.

[MrSmiley]

A co-worker of mine isn't foolish enough to have magnets... but she has one of those doohickeys that's hooked up to the phone and lights up to let other people know she's on a call (and not to bother her). I mention this only because it's afixed to the monitor and I can *see* how it interferes with the monitor's refresh rate on the screen (probably more of a gaussing issue) and think it's distracting. But nope... she doesn't listen to me or want to move it.

[Mister]

http://insteadofwork.net/post/194057...sk-you-were-so

It's old, but people apparently haven't learned.

[Hitokiri Akins]

From the way my friend described it, this woman probably had a dozen fridge magnets, because how else could that happen? Besides, the woman did say, "I wanted to make my computer look pretty." Which, to me anyway, suggests a LOT of magnets.

[Dreamstalker]

The Repair Shop From Hades once had a box come in that had about a dozen fridge magnets stuck to it, one or two of which were the rare-earth types I never did find out if anything was recoverable, I got yelled at for removing them and at that time there was no bench rig so I couldn't have accessed the drive anyway.

[technical.angel]

I've had one or two people w/ magnets on their PCs. Thankfully, never enough to cause problems. One thing I hope to never see.

[trunks2k]

Although it's a silly thing to do, I'd doubt fridge magnets on the case, even a lot of them, would have much of an effect. They just aren't that strong, especially when compared to the magnet that is inside a hard drive.

I also wouldn't expect random files to disappear while the rest of the computer works just fine. If there was real file system corruption happening due to magnets, there would probably be much bigger problems.

[Hitokiri Akins]

There probably were, but what I told is all I know about.

[Sonoma]

It just boggles my mind how someone could think that putting fridge magnets on a computer is a good idea.

But the plain beige cases are so boring...(sarcasm off)

[Dreamstalker]

Regular fridge magnets might not do a lot in the way of badness, but I'd venture that the rare-earth ones can in the right places(although I've not seen a case of that myself).