We just threw away several thousand dollars of old computer equipment from our store room. As they were wheeling out the corpses of the fallen I noticed that in one of our old beige servers there was, along with about sixteen 18.2gig SCSI drives, a reasonably usable tape drive.

The problem? That beige box was put together with hate and molten iron. Normal tools were of no use against it. It was garbage anyway…it had to be ripped apart. The front fascia was snapped, et cetera. Well, one part of it got me. The internal fan housing ripped free suddenly and stabbed me right in my damn knuckle. It didn’t hurt, and it doesn’t even look bad, but it bled like crazy on the various things around. I had to wrap it in a napkin to continue my work. The end results:

Crappy cell phone shot of my ‘wound.’

Crappy cell phone shot of just how filthy my hand got ripping that thing apart. In person, both my palms and fingers were solid grey with dust, oil, and the drippings from the Compaq’s black heart.

Oh, this is after I washed it the first time.

To the victor go the gigantic spoils.