A printer that was sent to be cleaned with “canned air” got blown to bits when an industrial-strength compressor was used instead.
The Register reported that a printer that required cleaning by an engineering company was blown apart, and that an IT support worker, known only as Bill, was called to fix it. In 2000 Bill was asked to repair a broken inkjet printer, and reported that “I visited the site and was informed by one of the printer’s users that the ‘Clean printheads’ light had illuminated on the printer’s control panel”.
The printer user had tried to clean the printheads with “compressed air”, which Bill thought was actually a good idea to clean off any ink, but when he arrived, he found that the employee had used a “factory air compressor” and “blown the printer away”. Bill said that the compressor was “the sort of hurricane needed to clean engine blocks” and that he “removed the defunct (but admittedly very clean) printer and replaced it with an identical, working unit”, telling the user “that in future he must only use the cleaning function on the printer application on the attached PC”.
Unfortunately the employee did not inform other users, and a few weeks later he was called again to the site for exactly the same problem: “It turns on the first user had failed to pass on the message about cleaning the printer to his colleagues, one of whom had subsequently air-blasted the second unit to its untimely death.”