Degaussing Wand fun
Sorry in advance for geekness

FYI
A degaussing wand is a nice little bundle of electro magnets that used to be used a few years back for degaussing CRT monitors (before the inbuilt deguass button was a common option)

These days its just an overpriced very strong magnet used for deleting data from HDD's etc.

The story

We had an old high power battery powered degaussing wand in the back of the drawer left over from the days when we had lots of CRT monitors about the place.

One of the trainee techies dug it out and asked what it was, so we dug out an old CRT monitor, put some batterys in the wand and showed hime the fun you could have distorting the screen image by holding the tip of the wand an inch or so from the screen and moving it in circles. This is how we used to degauss a CRT monitor

While we were doing this the boss of the day wondered in for a quick chat, and admired our big powerful wand (oooh errr) and then wandered off again on his travels.

he popped in again a couple of hours later asking where the trainee was, as he had some work for him, so we told him that the trainee had been so impressed with the wand that he had gone on a tour of the server rooms to "degauss" the little LCD screens on the front of all of the Dell servers (next to the hard drives).

The poor guy turned white and ran in the direction of the nearest server room as fast as he could, meeting the trainee who had really just gone for a coffee half way and physically rugby tackling him to the ground.

We would have got a right bollocking for the joke if the boss had not been so embarrased
!
( RadG Drinking Mojitos in the sun, Fri 22 Aug 2008, 11:57, 1 reply)

Ha Ha
you could be a right bastard with that wand, you could swipe it over someones pocket and kill their credit cards.
( Colonel Dracula Two manky hookers and a racist dwarf, Fri 22 Aug 2008, 12:02, closed)