I cut myself on the inside of a PC for the first time ever, today. I’m not even being pedantic and counting Macs as not-PCs (an opinion that’s more laughable than ever, what with Intel inside and all)—I’ve just never injured myself before. Of course, the most I’ve done historically has been to swap hard drives and install RAM.
My experience swapping hard drives was all that was needed today, though. A coworker’s PC repeatedly decided to pack up and… uh… shut down spontaneously. Our IT guy diagnosed it as a bad power supply (makes sense), but couldn’t get in to perform a hard drive transplant—we have a donor body PC—until tomorrow. Catch: I needed that computer today!
Hence my digging around the guts of two PCs, the laceration I sustained (though I have no idea from what, exactly), and my ironic sterilization of my hands after the operation.
Wow. And here I thought that the “blood sacrifice” was part of normal routine for mucking about inside of computer cases. Mind you, most newer (and non-cheap) cases lack so many of those nasty unfinished edges which can REALLY ruin your day, but there’s still plenty to poke and slice fingers with. You’ve been lucky, man.
Yeah, I now know that shedding blood inside cases is a fairly common experience; I must admit that the first time I heard of it was in casual conversation, where I was quite surprised to hear case-related injuries spoken of as all-but-assumed.
Having experienced a (surprisingly painless) bloodletting inside a newer/non-cheap case, I’d hate to imagine the potential for damage inside a cheap one.