This story was inspired by a series of events involving bad capacitors over a period of many years, culminating in my fixing a monitor that had several capacitors go bad as described in this story.
It was first posted on Facebook.
I walked down a flight of stairs to a basement. It was full of computer equipment, video screens, old junk, and empty doughnut and pizza boxes. The walls were covered with posters. They said things like: “Don’t type ‘Google’ into Google — you’ll break the Internet!” and “Over 2 Billion N00B5 PWND” and “The Most Dangerous Creature Known to Man: A Programmer with a Screwdriver.”
L337 D00D walked over to a table. Piles of circuit boards lay on the table. “Here ya seez da graveyard o’ da Great Capacitor Caper.” I looked at the table, puzzled. It just looked like piles of wires, boards and random junk to me.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“Feast yer eyes on dis one.” He held up one of the boards. He pointed to some cylindrical objects sticking up from the board. They had a dirty, cracked look to them.
“Dese’r capacitors. Dey filter da power dat goes t’ da important parts. Kind of smooth out da bumps, give it a nice even ride.”
“But dey don’t look so good,” I said. Drat! He was wearing off on me. If I stayed too long I’d come out sounding like a Jersey City wise guy.
“No. Dey don’t. An’ da story of how dey gots to be like dat, it’s a story o’ international intrigue an’ espionage.”
“Howz ya figger?” Yikes! Worse and worse. Time was running out!
“You seez, for a long time capacitors like dis were made using expensive chemicals. An’ even den dey didn’t work so good. But a mook in Japan figgerd out how t’ replace most o’ da expensive chemicals with water. And dey worked better.”
“Wow, just water. I bet dat ….” I took a deep breath. “I mean … that … guy got rich.”
“He got rich, but one o’ his co-workers felt left off da gravy train. Copied da formula an’ took it wid him t’ China. Sold it t’ some Taiwanese companies who started using it. Unfortunately, da co-worker didn’t copy so good. Da formula was incomplete. Da capacitors made wid it would start generatin’ hydrogen. After a while dey’d make like dat old German airship, da Hindenburg. BOOM.” He pointed at one circuit board. There was a kind of puffy papery thing that had black char around it. “Dere’s one dat went off. Most o’ dem just ooze an’ stop workin’.”
He took the desktop and put it on a workbench. “Let’s take a look at dis puppy, shall we?”
He adeptly opened it up. He pulled the cover off and looked at a large board that seemed to hold most of the innards of the computer. “Hmn, dis looks fine ta me.”
More screwdriver twirling. He yanked out a box trailing a bunch of wires and started in on that. He soon had it open.
“Dere’s your spent brass,” he said. I saw two papery clusters in the midst of a bunch of parts. Several of the other parts were cracked with brown ooze coming out. “Dis guy was nuttin’ but a time bomb dat finally went off.”
“Looks like we’ve found the culprit. Anything we can do?”
“Sure. I just happin ta have one o’ dese babies handy. I’ll puts it in, if ya don’t mind goin’ out for another one o’ dose anchovy-an’-ham beauties.”
“I’ll throw in some more doughnuts,” I said gratefully.