Sometime late last fall I received a call from a local business. They had a Unix box that was on the fritz, but unfortunately only had MCSE's on their support staff.

After meeting up with my contact at the site, I tried to get a little more information about what kind of problem it was having. As we walked to the elevators he explained that no one really knew exactly what the box did, or if it was even in use anymore, but it was obvious that the machine was rebooting itself for no apparent reason.

We got out of the elevator at the basement level of the building. The server was sitting alone in a damp room with a concrete floor and concrete walls. I was already pretty sure it was going to be a hardware problem, since Unix boxes don't tend to reboot for absolutely no reason. I pointed out that the damp environment was undoubtedly bad for the machine.

He said, "The honest truth is, no one wants anything to do with this box. It's sitting down here because we're out of space in our server room, and the only guy that knew anything about this box quit three years ago, so we don't even know if it's doing anything useful." With that he turned and left me to figure out the problem.

The machine was plugged in, the power switch was on, but the console was blank and mashing on the keyboard didn't seem to have any affect.

As I was unscrewing the side panel from the case I started to notice that there was a really rank stench in the room. When I first entered the room I figured it was just mildew from the dampness or something, but it was really strong now. I really just wanted to get out of that dimly lit room and out into the sunlight and fresh air.

It was hard to see anything in the case, so I fumbled around inside it with my hands making sure all the internal cables were securely attached to their respective components. Suddenly I felt something squishy and slimy on my hand and jerked it out of the box.

At that instant the machine came on and began to POST. As the memory counted up, I turned the box so I could see into it by the light of the screen. Now I could see the cause of the problem. A rat had crawled into the case via an open drive bay and made a nest near one of the power supplies. She and several hairless newborns had died in there a week or two previous, and I had just stuck my hand in the middle of it all.

As I was wiping my hands off on my pants, I noticed the machine had finished booting. I was like "Ugh, gross! This thing is running SCO Unix!"

Needless to say, I marched right up to the IT offices and told them that the machine was undoubtedly no longer relevant to their business and that they should just throw the whole mess in the dumpster.

Recently I was shopping around for a high-end German-made sedan. The new ones were just way out of my price range so I was looking for a recent used model.

After searching everywhere I found an incredible deal. When I questioned the salesman about the extremely low price he explained that the previous owners had died in the vehicle. At first I thought "Yeah, so what?"

It turns out that the previous summer they had been driving through the Florida everglades and gotten lost. They eventually baked to death in the car miles from nowhere when it ran out of gas.

The first thing I noticed when I opened the door was that the seats were permanently stained where the bodies had rotted for over a month in the summer sun. This was followed by a terrible nauseating wave of putrescence. But when I turned the key, I was like, "Ugh gross! The GPS navigation system runs on Windows CE!"

Needless to say, I abandoned all thoughts of purchasing that particular vehicle.

We had this developer that used to piss off everyone at the office. So one night I went to his workstation, removed Linux and installed Windows. Then I pissed all over his chair. After that I wanked off into his coffee mug just for good measure.

Still, I felt like the job wasn't done, so I pulled down my britches and dropped a load right on his keyboard. Then I grabbed his sweater off the back of his chair and used it to wipe my arse.

You should've seen his face the next day when he came into work and saw the whole mess. He was like, "Ugh, gross! Someone installed Windows on my workstation!"

Needless to say, he didn't fuck with anyone at the office after that.