Ants Invade iBook

xkranda writes "Seriously ... this is off the Apple Discussions site. Apparently some poor sap's iBook became infested with ants. All I have to say is ew! Ew! Ew! Ew!!!"

Comments

Ants and electronics

[erik umenhofer]

Ants are supposed to have a strange sense of magnetic fields and electric fields. Electronics give off a lot of stuff, animals are especially attuned to it. They have been known to short out traffic lights etc., by crawling inside and bridging connections. They use these fields for navigation and stuff. They are pretty precise.

Re:Ants and electronics

[cervo]

Report Has a report from the department of Engineering Technology at Texas Tech about ways to stop fire ant damage. The first few pages discuss the problem: Basically it says that the alternating magnetic fields generated by and within the electronic equipment attract the ants from short distances. When the ant dies the electricity causes strange reactions, including the release of pheromones which attract other ants. And it seems that in some places this is a serious problem as was said with some figures quoted. However this report is about fire ants and I am too lazy to research more to see if it generalizes to all aunt species so good luck :)

Beats roaches

[MacAndrew]

True story -- I remember a report a dozen years ago of a person who took in her buggy Macintosh SE. It was full of cockroaches, eggs and everything. I have no idea how that could happen, or what the owner's concept of hygeine was. Maybe she left too many muffins sitting on top to warm.

Something like this...

[Brigadoon]

I heard once about a problem like this before. A few cities in the southern US were having. Apparently, red ants would get into traffic lights' circuitry and completely destroy the stuff, costing a great deal of money.

It turns out that a few ants had got in there and fried. Upon their deaths, their bodies released pheremones, attracted more ants, who promptly got fried, releasing even more pheremones, attracting more ants... You get the idea.

Killed my pentium.

[uberstool]

I use to keep a P133 out in the garage workbench. I One day, I went out and the screen was black. I powered down for a hard reboot and got a few odd beeps and nothing else. I live in the middle of the Arizona desert and expected dust would eventually kill the machine. Turns out a fat ass black widow spider decided to melt her fat self on my processor.

Seen it before...

[breser]

I had something like this happen once before to me to a cordless phone charging stand that was in my kitchen. Something with sugar in it got underneath the charger and the ants made the charger their home. I'd guess someone left something sweet was around the computer. I haven't seen the comment since Apple's site isn't responding.

I just take the charger apart. Sprayed it with Lysol (yes this will kill ants). Put it in a plastic bag and left it. Next morning lots of dead ants. Then came cleanup followed by lots of drying. I also had to keep spraying for ants
until eventually they quit coming back.

However the charger is still working nicely for me. :)

xbox roaches

[paradesign]

the first shippments of xboxes had roaches in them. my girlfriend works at funcoland, and when they cut into the boxes to unpack them roaches came skittering out and scared the shit out of them.

I can beat all the insect/reptile takeover stories

[Derg]

I had a buddy of mine ask me to take a look at his computer. It had begun to make thumping/ticking noises when he would turn it on, and would not stop till he turned it off. I cracked the case, to find a quite dead and petrified rat inside his case, that thumped against his cpu fan. fuckin sick.. how it got in, and died in such a way to not stink to high heaven, I will never know, though I suspect someone put it there..

How about Omniview switchboxes?

[antdude]

Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 09:07:26 -0800
From: TechSupp
To: ...
Subject: RE: ants in omniview switchboxes

Thanks for the feedback. This is a new one to us. If you have any problems
down the road let us know and we will replace them. I have forwarded this
info to the President of Belkin and the Product Managers.

Technical Support Manager
Belkin Components

-----Original Message-----
From: ...
Sent: Monday, November 27, 2000 10:24 AM
Subject: ants in omniview switchboxes

came back to work from the holiday weekend. noticed a stream of ants
going up the cables in the back of a rack in the server room. oddly, this
stream of ants was carring larva up the omniview cables, and appeared to
be entering the omniview via the dip switch hole, and then exiting withot
the larve. I traced the stream out of the building, then traced a smaller
stream down a hallway and to another room with another system with an
omniview. here as well ants were streaming in from outside with larve,
depositing them in the omniview, and exiting. I took both omniviews
outside and opened them. hundreds of ants and hundreds of tiny white ant
larve were in each omniview, apparently storing and guarding the ants
under the bottom circut board. nothing was hurt, so I shook/knocked/blew
the ants out, dissasembled the omniview, coated the case with ant spray,
let dry, reassembled, reinstalled, everything works fine.

it dosen't appear the ants were after food in either case. I think
something about the omniview gave them a home they felt compelled to store
their larva in. I just can't explain why they would pick those, and how
the so effectivley found the only two omniviews on that side of our
building. the omniviews involved are both SE 4 port, and are still
working fine.

-J.R.

Webs and nests collect moisture.

[drowsy]

Back when I was a Mac hardware repair guy, this person came in with an SE30 that would fail "only in the mornings". We thought it might be an odd time-sensitive extension like an anti-virus app, but we opened it up, and it had some big bug habitat in there. Even though the bugs seemed absent, their nests would collect the morning dew and short out the board.

Ive had worse...

[rosewood]

So, I was doing my time, paying my dues and doing what I could to bring quality to the lifeless void that is a Best Buy black shirt technician (well, we became black shirts while I worked there). Anyhoo, this "woman" brought in a very old packard bell that was covered in yellow dust. A smoker. Some of the worse shit comes from smokers. As soon as she walked in the door, the AV tech told me to tell her to go away. My manager heard this and got pissy. She later recanted.

She brought her computer up and slapped down her PSP that had 20 or so days left and demanded a new computer because this one would no longer turn on. So I said okay, checked it in and put it in the back. When we opened it, a whole cock-a-roach family came running out. I almost vommited right then and there. It took WEEKs to get rid of those fuckers, adn even then we knew they were not gone.

Aparently about two months earlier this same nasty lady came in to the av area with a vcr for a "cleaning." When the AV tech opened it he found a dead mouse and silverfish. To this day you can find silver fish in that best buy :

"Ants Ate My Hub!" from Paul Lujan

[akiy]

This reminds me of the November 4th entry (scroll down a bit) on Paul Lujan's site entitled, "Ants Ate My Hub!". Pretty funny(?)...

How about Roaches in an IBM

[Hardwyred]

When I was doing my time as a bench tech, a guy brought in his IBM desktop, complaining that it had turned itself on, smoked and will not work anymore. We figured lightening. When he brought it in, it had the yellow staines of a smoker, but nothing else to tip us off. I opened the box and dozens of roaches came pooring out. We had to bag it up and call the guy, telling him that we couldn't work on his PC under warranty because IBM refused to pay for bug bomb! The roaches had curled up in his power supply, nested there and started eating the cables. To this day my skin still crawls when I see one of those IBM desktops.