This story was inspired by a series of events involving bad<\/i> capacitors over a period of many years, culminating in my fixing a<\/i> monitor that had several capacitors go bad as described in this<\/i> story.<\/i> <\/p>\n
It was first posted on Facebook.<\/i> <\/p>\n
Part 1 can be found here.<\/a> Part 2 can be found here.<\/a> Part 3 can be found here.<\/a><\/p>\n 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.” <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n “I don’t get it,” I said. <\/p>\n “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. <\/p>\n “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.” <\/p>\n “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. <\/p>\n “No. Dey don’t. An’ da story of how dey gots to be like dat, it’s a story o’ international intrigue an’ espionage.” <\/p>\n “Howz ya figger?” Yikes! Worse and worse. Time was running out! <\/p>\n “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.” <\/p>\n “Wow, just water. I bet dat ….” I took a deep breath. “I mean … that … guy got rich.” <\/p>\n “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’.” <\/p>\n He took the desktop and put it on a workbench. “Let’s take a look at dis puppy, shall we?” <\/p>\n 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.” <\/p>\n More screwdriver twirling. He yanked out a box trailing a bunch of wires and started in on that. He soon had it open. <\/p>\n “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.” <\/p>\n “Looks like we’ve found the culprit. Anything we can do?” <\/p>\n “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.” <\/p>\n “I’ll throw in some more doughnuts,” I said gratefully. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Serialization of short story: The Great Capacitor Caper<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,13],"tags":[51,50],"class_list":["post-137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor","category-serial","tag-nerdy","tag-technology","has-excerpt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/goodnews.homedns.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/goodnews.homedns.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/goodnews.homedns.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goodnews.homedns.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goodnews.homedns.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/goodnews.homedns.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1522,"href":"https:\/\/goodnews.homedns.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions\/1522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/goodnews.homedns.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goodnews.homedns.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goodnews.homedns.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}