How a Cable Company Incinerated a PowerBook

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A customer has supplied photographs of an incident in which a cable company technician, confused by the wiring on a customeris rooftop, connected the Internet coaxial cable to a live power outlet resulting in a flash of light and an explosion as loud as an M-80 in her PowerBook. The continuing story was posted at Macwork on Saturday.

"Everything on the desk was blackened with soot and burned either partially or completely. Three external hard drives, a digital camera, videotapes, papers, CD?s, etc. The floor, wall, and radiator cover were burned, along with the tabletop." according to the investigation.

"Every cable that was connected to the laptop, Ethernet, Firewire, Power, and USB, was forcibly shot out of each portal, and each portal covered with the black soot. Metal bits and electronic debris from the power cable hub and other cables was scattered around the room and some wires had split apart into copper shreds. Molten silver metal flecks are still lodged in the windowsill."

No one was hurt, and all data was successfully recovered.

John Martellaro

John Martellaro

John Martellaro was born at an early age and began writing about computers soon after that. He is a former U.S. Air Force officer and has worked for NASA, White Sands Missile Range, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Apple. At Apple he worked as a Senior Marketing Manager, a Federal Account Executive and a High Performance Computing manager. His interests include skiing, chess, science fiction and astronomy. You can follow John on Twitter at twitter.com/jmartellaro.

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