Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

Another day, another computer story

I had to clean up a chemical spill today. It sounds more exciting than it was...apparently none of the chemists were available (I'm the spill cleaner of last resort), and a guy in the mail room spilled some solvent on his desk. When he called me, he said "It's literally three drops; can't I clean it up myself?"

I'm the procedure-following type, so I said no. As it happens, the three drops of solvent were on the guy's computer keyboard, and when I wiped it up, the plastic came with it. Probably he doesn't need the shift key to say "Shift," but after thinking about it for a minute, I unplugged the keyboard and bagged the whole thing as contaminated waste.

I spent the rest of the day waiting for IT to call and bitch me out. But on the upside, one of my coworkers pointed out that taking the guy's keyboard pretty much guarantees that they'll never call me to clean up a spill again.