Another time in the days of 5.25″ floppy disks, my friend got called out to fix a 5.25″ floppy drive. Yes they used to fix them because they were so expensive. Anyway, he removed the top from the drive and the read head and mechanics where covered in a very sticky red substance. He could not successfully clean the drive so had to write it off, explaining to the customer that he could not determine what the substance was or where it had come from. He said to the customer that they would need to purchase a replacement at considerable cost.
As he was leaving, a lady asked him if he could look at here floppy drive as it was getting very slow and unreliable. There was a disk in the drive so he removed it and noticed that in the little window where the disks magnetic media is exposed (So data can be read from and written to the Disk) there appeared to be the same substance that he had found in the other drive smeared across the surface.
He decided that the only way he would find out what it was, was to taste it. Well he thought, since when have they started lubricating floppy drives with strawberry jam, yep strawberry jam.
He stood up and announced to the office the cause of the failures and a women standing across from him went bright red and decided that maybe she should come clean.
A few days earlier they were celebrating one of the staffs birthdays and that person had bought in the obligatory cakes for everyone in the office. This lady returned to her desk to eat her jam doughnut. As she bit into it, the jam decided to exit the doughnut in one gloop, so rather than get it on her dress, grabbed the first thing she could find which happened to be a 5.25″ floppy disk. She saved her dress and caught the gloop on the disk. Now rather than land on the outer sleeve, the jam hit the little window I mentioned above and realising her mistake decided to hide the evidence by manually turning the disk inside the sleeve. She wiped the remainder of the jam from the sleeve and put the disk back on her desk.
Now these disks contained various office files and eventually this disk was used on some of the office PC’s with the resulting jammy gloop on the disk surface being transferred to the innards of the disk drive.
That little exercise cost her company quite a few hundred quid rather than a few quid to have her dress cleaned.
