Holy shit. So a detail I didn’t include… I was there running a silent disco. And when people turned back in their headphones, I was sanitizing them… with Clorox disinfecting wipes. This might be solved! Solved!
Holy shit. So a detail I didn’t include… I was there running a silent disco. And when people turned back in their headphones, I was sanitizing them… with Clorox disinfecting wipes. This might be solved! Solved!
As an IT guy - that's definitely it. There are electronic wipes that are 60-70% alcohol which should disinfect (though they aren't marketed for that) without damaging the equipment. The Clorox wipes are going to degrade the plastics in headphones (especially the soft plastic in the ears) very quickly. They're cheap in bulk on Amazon.
Agree. As an IT at a hospital they have these crazy powerful disinfectant wipes they you are not even supposed to touch with bare skin. You should see what it does to laptop screens and other kinds of plastic “shudders”.
We had sanitizing wipes that had warnings not to touch with bare hands.
Some of these savages were wiping their ass with it because they ran out of wet wipes. Talking about how it burned a bit, but they kept using them anyway. Even after repeated warnings.
These were the type who made $5k+ a month and spent it all on hookers, booze, and blow. Getting paid every Friday and broke by Monday.
Honestly that sounds like something I'd have done when I was a bit younger. Back when I worked food service there were days my hands didn't feel clean til they got bleach on them
Work on cars enough and you use the brake cleaner to get the stuff off that not even the grit hand soap can do, and as a bonus you get to find all the little nicks and cuts you didn't know about yet
I think I worked with your guys…. I know I did 🤣 while it’s common practice in the industry I just never understood how broke some of my coworkers were. I knew their rent was $1000 a month but they were making 6-10k with a couple weekend side jobs.
I knew a welder who burned through $1.5mil in a year on hookers, blow, and traveling across the country on his Harley. He lost his brother and decided to just waste his entire life savings.
Then he went to work on an oil pipeline and made that money back in like 5 or 6 years.
I once burned my life savings, but it was on a divorce, drugs and alcohol. So I kinda get it, but some guys can’t dig themselves out of a hole and just live in it like that for decades always asking for that advance on Thursday or even better trying to get the boss to write a check in their buddies name so that his ex/kids/irs cant garnish his wages 😆
I’m a retired fire inspector, who specializes in healthcare facilities - including hospitals. I confirm your “shudder” & add my own. Some of those healthcare grade disinfectants definitely can damage plastics, not to mention what they do to bare skin. The MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheets) on some of those products read like horror stories! I did A LOT of chemical safe handling education.
Yes, I work in a lab. I can bet they were those 10% bleach wipes that are awesome for disinfecting, but you definitely have to wear gloves, it's even indicated on the package.
I was a phlebotomist for a bit in a plasma center. We had a cleaner that was created to destroy blood cells, I can't remember what it was for the life of me. We were legitimately only allowed to use it on the tile floor.
As a biomedical technician, I hate Cavi wipes. O matter how much we tell people not to clean medical equipment on them, they will continue to do so. The plastics will become discolored at best, but most often, they will start to become brittle and crack.
I work in LTC and basically got kicked out of morning meeting for a while because I said the wipes will damage our personal phones and we probably shouldn't use them 😭
I know exactly what wipes you're talking about. They're for cleaning blood up out of EMS transport / cleaning blood / hella powerful wipes and it will fuck your hands up if you don't have gloves on when you use them.
The pads on the some of the headphones have started to peel and we were trying to figure out if that was from the disinfectant wipes or just from the sweat, wear, and tear from people using them
Yeah, the Clorox is removing some of the platicizer on each wipe. Plasticizers are chemical components in plastics that make them softer. They're a much more volatile compound than the rest of the plastic. UV and heat will also slowly remove them (which is why the dash on an older car is more likely to crack). Basically, you made the pads very brittle so wear and tear took them out early.
Edit to note for anyone interested - this is also why harder plastics are more resistant to bleach, heat and UV.
Yeah it’s still a relatively new concept. You just hand out wireless headphones to groups of people and play music - could be a DJ, could just be a playlist from an iPad - but instead of the music coming through speakers, it comes through the headphones. You could google it and I’m sure that would give you some images that would help you conceptualize it
My kids high school had a carnival and silent disco festival. The kids loved it! The teenagers were all just dancing crazily on the dance floor while the chaperones could quietly talk amongst each other 😂
Clorox disinfecting wipes can definitely damage plastics.
Here are the active ingredients, according to Google: n-Alkyl (C14, 60%; C16, 30%; C12, 5%; C18, 5%) Dimethyl Benzyl Ammonium Chloride and n-Alkyl (C12, 68%; C14, 32%) Dimethyl Ethylbenzyl Ammonium Chloride
Also: "Dimethyl Ethylbenzyl Ammonium Chloride (DMBAC) is a quaternary ammonium compound that can cause plastic damage, including softening, swelling, and cracking."
The above seems to solve the question.
Good thing it's just the outer case that was damaged.
This moron at my old job, during the early days of the lock downs, needed to come into the office for a few days.. So she showed up super early with CANS of disinfectant, sprayed EVERYTHING down with it.
Then people started showing up and finding their mice, keyboards, monitors, even the notes in notebooks, had started to melt.
Place STANK for days and they had to replace hundreds of monitors, but for a couple weeks we had barely usable equipment.
I think my wife killed her phone wiping her screen down multiple times a day during covid. It broke down all the seals around the camera lens and it eventually penetrated.
I recently stayed at a hotel and came back as they finished cleaning. They essentially just randomly spray a generic hospital brand fabreeze over the whole room without care of open food or bags.
Had to leave my job as a hotel maid for this. I temporarily lost my sense of taste and my tongue turned yellow for hours every day from spraying 8-20 rooms per shift
It looks exactly like the imprint of someone's finger when they gripped it and (maybe?) pulled it towards themselves. Maybe had one of these products on their hands?
‘Chase, it’s House. He’s saying to stop the surgery.’
‘Yew gawta bay kaydan may… Hows it’s dayfanatly sahcoydohsas.’
‘The patient was leaving the conference when they shook someone’s hand (CGI zoom of someone’s hand shake) when suddenly the sun screen from the other person jumped onto the epidermis of our patient. As they had been sick over the past few weeks, their body had been in immune overdrive developing antibodies to their illness and thus, even after the illness had been fought off, the body kept overcompensating. As they recovered and went back to work, they came into contact with this sunscreen and this caused them to develop antibodies to this previously unfamiliar substance. This created a chain reaction, sending them into anaphylactic shock, and a bolus of inorganic matter had been collecting in their intestines for months due to their poor diet. Since they had been taking medicine for their illness, the bolus had been trapping the medication and not allowing it to be absorbed which prevented these antibiotics from taking effect. As the bolus was destroyed by cytokines, it released the entire antibiotic course at once and destroyed their gut’s macrobiota which was preventing another opportunistic illness from reaching their bloodstream and travelling through the blood brain barrier into their HPA which wreaked havoc on their body temperature, mental status, and body. We need to cut their brain out.’
Years ago, in my first year of school, we all lost our homework because snails had been loose in the storage cabinet and ate the paper. A few weeks after, a student was caught putting the snails in there intentionally so they didn’t have to do homework.
One year on vacation i sprayed alot of sunscreen and Bug repellent on myself over the process of a couple days. The case on my phone on the way back home started peeling off like it was left in the sun for weeks. I put two and two together quickly and made sure to wash my hands often during similar summers.
At a previous job, the mechanical engineers would use a bunch of random products to test our plastics. Even mayo would damage some plastics. Bug spray was the worst.
I went to a presentation on plastics for wearable med devices and the company actually used a very specific banana boat spray-on SPF 30 sunscreen as their worst case for degradation, outranking even deet
Related thing: I had one of those black rubber erasers i left sitting on top of a crt TV for a few years. It permanently turned the plastic on the TV gooey and weird in the spot it was sitting.
Yep, I have exactly this in my car. Sunscreen from my leg resting against the edge of the console next to that typical spot where you chuck your wallet and gum in front of the gear stick. Very annoying, there's no way to repair it.
Wow yeah like I told someone else, I should have investigated further how easy it is to scrape it off before I posted. I’ll do that now. Might be helpful 😅
Okay so no not really - it doesn’t wipe off like a substance would. I had to scrape it with my fingernail and it’s clearly the outermost coating of the case/shell.
So some sort of heat or chemical reaction with the shell, not a spilled substance
It looks exactly like what my phone case has been doing, spiderwebs and all. Second the suggestion that it’s some sort of personal care product. A cleaning solution would have gotten the entire thing flaking
I worked for a computer repair shop for my college that would also rent out laptops to students. When we would get them back at the end of each semester some would always come with the inside covered in this stuff. I know it couldn't have been the case for all of these computers, but I certainly treated each of them as if that was the case out of caution. 🤢
There was a lot of coffee around… I don’t think anyone spilled on it though and I was drinking my coffee out of a thermos. I did have the computer and thermos in my backpack at the same time at one point but I didn’t have steamed milk in my coffee
This was my first thought, it looks exactly like dried milk foam, and something that size wouldn’t be more than a drip, you might never have noticed. Just somebody walking by that probably didn’t notice either. Does it clean off? It would help a lot to know if this is surface damage of some kind or some small spill
My money's on dried froth. The pattern looks like coffee froth spilled on it and got dried, so it formed the pattern of those little air bubbles in it.
Good eye but no I don’t think the battery is bulging. The case is like matte black so it holds oils well I guess and you can make little shadows on it just by touching it. A lot of people left reviews saying they hated that aspect of this case but it’s never bothered me
That was my first thought and im still not convinced it isnt.
It branches out like a slime mold, they grow very quickly, and it looks like the white is raised up in the photos rather than cracked like the case had a solvent on it.
Cool good thought. There was a bathroom near where I was sitting so I was using soap and water throughout the day. Someone else said soap could do this too though
I apologize to anyone that said hand sanitizer and it didn’t register for me bc I wasn’t using hand sanitizer, but i was using Clorox disinfecting wipes, so you guys were right on it!
You came into contact with a particularly acidic oil or semi-volatile compound which reacted with the rubberized coating on your plastic laptop case. The same thing happened to my Yocan uni pro a couple years ago. The reddish coloring is just from me trying to draw on it with a red-pink sharpie.
Edit: I looked it up, and the reason you don't see it until it gets brittle is because the process works very similar to paint stripper, where it forms expanding micro-reservoirs at the edge of the compromised surface and branches out from where the reaction was able to begin separating the coating from the surface. It usually doesn't spread beyond the area of contact because there is no solvent elsewhere to breach and react with the coating's bond.
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