The worst thing about working in game stores or secondhand shops is dealing with slobs, bumpkins, and hoarders that try to pass off crap they didn't take care of or keep clean at all.
Ah, retail memories. I had a case with bugs but the weirdest one, albeit a PC, was a Compaq SR5250NX with a freaking huge centipede inside, the owner was clueless in everything computing and the only info we had is that it was functioning and suddenly stopped soon after he noticed a "weird smell". Crazy.
Sounds like a friend of mine who had to replace the circuit board on his heating system because a bat of all things somehow crawled up underneath the board and got fried.
Last year at work someone had a filthy laptop, I cleaned it and he thought I gave him a brand new one I told him, it's the same laptop, I wiped it down with some wipes (I was trying to find a polite way to tell him he's disgusting) Thing looked like he used it as a plate
When people come in with a bug infested system, they are actually the "mothership", what do i mean by that? These kind off people are just squishing the bugs with their feet, hands, clothing or whatever. Whenever you squish a roach, you become an 'egg-carrier', everything you touch, walk over or sit down on, will have eggs, these are microscopic, people don't realise this. The moment somebody like this walks into your building, that's enough to create an infestation. Roaches don't even have to escape, and since game stores use a lot of carpets, that's the perfect scenario for a quick hatch of rhese eggs, because it is warm. This family thought it was funny, but in fact, they costed your store 1000's of dollars to desinfect every inch of the store. I know what i am talking about, i worked at a second hand shop, and we took in furniture, and would you know, there was furniture comming out of a place infested with roaches. They are the most resiliant pest on this planet. You can freeze them, starve them, burn them, but their eggs will always find a way to start a new infestation; I HATE roaches!
I got a 360 bug infested that I found near a trash bin outside 4 years ago. Put it back in a sealed bag to make a video in the future. I think you just gave me the motivation to actually make that video 😆
A Coworker of mine had me take a look at his dead PS4 that had a game stuck in the drive. I got the system at the start of my shift and threw it in my trunk in the middle of an Ohio winter. After my shift was over I got it home and took it out of the bag and a lethargic roach, still clinging to life, flopped onto my floor. Then a couple more slowly emerged from the vents. I quickly removed the disk, set the PS4 in my garage and fired off a bug bomb that happened to be handy for some reason and just prayed none of them were still in my house. If the family wasn't home the house probably would have been burned down instead.
@@MrMario2011 The fact that it sat outside likely saved my home from a roach infestation. The cold rendered them almost completely immobile. But It was still really disgusting.
I had a similar experience 3 years ago with an Xbox One S I bought on a garage sale! The console from the outside looked clean and in working order. Be aware, I never left my eyesight on that Xbox. While I was testing it, I saw a single roach coming out from it. Since my room is FULL of electronics, especially old consoles, you can imagine the outcome if I didn't notice. I quickly got a box, closed the console in there and tapped any single side and any single angle. Although I shouldn't clean my electronics besides the outer shells since I'm allergic to dust, I still do it because I need to take care of my stuff. But anyway, I never got experience in roach threatment on electronics, so I called a repair shop in my zone, and asked if they could take care of it. They did, the price was high, but oh boy, they did. I got the console back home, but the shock was so huge I put it in a box and double taped it again. I stil lhave the console. I don't think it has roaches in there anymore, but the shock still remains. I will eventually win my fear and open that box one day, hoping to not see any kind of surprises out of it. tl;dr: Don't buy used consoles at garage sales, no matter their price. They could easily have roaches in there and that's gonna cost you more than the console itself. Especially if you don't notice at first. You can't really imagine the damage they could have done.
Also, small notice about roaches: They're VERY resistant and very sturdy. The repair shop who did it told me they used DDT and cleaned the whole mobo. Explained me they ATE the side of the mobo that was used to switch on the console and they had to use a jumper to get the console to turn on. I never noticed that at first, because I used the controller. Plus notice is that they're cannibals. They would eat themselves. This is why (even though your console was fully closed from BOTH sides, with basically no oxygen in it, with TWO plastic bags) after a few months it still had bugs in there.
love the stories man!! I would really love to see more of them in the near future also do you by chance have a playlist or something where I can easily find all the older story videos??
@@MrMario2011 Two years back, I had to deal with a roach PS4. The "solution" was to put it in 2-3 trash bags, followed by a multi-day vacation in a freezer. After freeing the internals of the corpses and giving the board a hella clean, the system somehow still works.
A couple years ago, i reoaired a playstation 3 that wouldn't boot. Stared taking it apart. Sheesh. Full of dead roaches. Was a friend of my sons. Poor kid was embarrassed as hell when we told him. The machine was full of bugs or "bugged" out lol
Yeah, I agree. As bad as that system was, holding it for months before contacting the customer again updating them on the situation was not professional at all. You guys should have contacted them shortly after coming to the conclusion that you wouldn't work on it. This would have been beneficial to both parties, because the customer can get on with their lives, and your store wouldn't be as likely to get infestation.
I personally would of just told them No but i think one way to fix bug infested electronics is to place them in a bag and in a ice cold freezer with no food or drinks and wait a few months and let the bugs pass away
Understandable. I also would like to say that consoles are placed in garages for storage or to repair them. Garages can be perfect for repairing electronics as it's a perfect space for tool boxes and a solder station. But they need to be cleaned and sweeped. Also electronics need to be placed in containers so no dust builds up outside. Also needs to be tempted control with Air conditioning.
oh man, seeing this pop up in my recommended after i pried open my o.g. xbox just to find it's also been bug infested :< not looking forward to when i have to clean that out, that's a task for another day since i just needed it's DVD drive (also thanks for your videos on softmodding the xbox; i ended up doing a tsop flash too, though i borked it up by using cerbios, and had to save it w/ a burned DVD, hence the DVD drive lol)
Could have offered the customer a different system as a part of the offering as a shop to say it’s beyond repair but you can purchase one. The system shouldn’t have been accepted for repair It’s interesting it still ran you could get someone to open it up outside with apron on and spray it out and dust it out
Wouldn't have been a bad idea, I did that with a few games I knew we had extra copies of but people bringing in their own copies to repair were too gouged or cracked to fix. About going outside - After this apparently my boss did have to do that for one console he didn't know was infested. He went through, stomped out all the roaches (literally), cleaned it, fixed it up, but said never again 😂
Mr. Mario literally doing some debugging. (For the story I had the same experience with doing laptop repairs, roaches tons of them, I still have mental itches and paranoia thinking they are crawling somewhere).
sometimes i really wonder how extreme these people must live i'm for example one of those meme-cat owners. even outside sheding season - fur everywhere! open the fridge - you see fur! my couch is like mandarin color - thick layer of his dark fur! so it's looks partially more anthracite-brown on his usually spots^^ meanwhile my eg ps4 (not in a closed shelf, so enough space to breath...and obiously for fur to get hin). it's launch silent oO like a year ago, i opened it out of curiosity (just in case), but barely any dust or fur so literally, how do these people live 😨
I kid you not, I used to get 50+ roach infested machines a week at a place I worked ( I was not allowed to refuse jobs). The worst part is how itchy you get at the end of the day Just FYI, you can fit A LOT of roaches in a Macbook Air
One time i buy a broken Xbox classic for parts and was terrble infested... I put it in plastic bag and spray it with bug killer, seal it and let it rest for a month
Yeah, retails sucks. Same memories and same feelings about the time when I was as a student in a PC store as technician and sometimes (in busy times) a salesperson in the main room. Repairing PCs was enjoyable, most of the time no customer was bugging me with questions, but talking to people and explain them again and again the same "half knowledge" salesperson have to have is annoying. My memories are a bit older than yours, a bit after the millennium. Windows ME was fading away and Windows XP available. And of course the mighty OG Xbox 🙂. These years made me what I'm today. A single player in work and gaming 🙂. You guys over the ocean always make me laugh with stories about roaches. We don't have them here and also no other insects with these likes to infect a console. Besides some spiders, opening a console/PC is sometimes accompanied by dust + nicotine, but also not a pleasure to work on.
I had no idea Windows ME caught on anywhere enough to fade away 🤣 Thanks for sharing! It sounds like your environment is much better if you don't want roaches in your electronics.
I had a friend that needed a place tp stay.. i was trying to help him, so i let him stay.. He stayed for a few months. After awhile i noticed bugs (chroach fuks). unaware that his xbox 360 was infested.. He acted like he did not know.. it took me months to get them out.. I had to tell him tok leave to inorder to full removes all the bugs. . Thats not even a joke .. i couldn't get them out so long as he was there too.. But yea ...
Deffo odd parents. As a kid in 00s I had some friends' parents who would store stuff away the nanosecond they stopped using them. Like dude just keep it under the TV unit
Thats funny, I purchased a Gears of War edition 360 from Mercari and it arrived full of roaches. I sent him images and he sent me a full refund and told me to keep it.
But the PS5 doesn't have any games, so it makes perfect sense to put it in a garage to let it collect dust / bugs. Lol, JK. But seriously, i don't think you compromised your professionalism by reacting to a visibly disgusting object. I a reasonable attempt has to be made to bring the console to a place in a presentable way. In this case, bring it in a sack. Disclose there are insects in it. If you saw the bugs from the grill, there's no way the kids couldn't have noticed the same thing, or their strange mother at the very least.
The worst thing about working in game stores or secondhand shops is dealing with slobs, bumpkins, and hoarders that try to pass off crap they didn't take care of or keep clean at all.
You have to become good at holding your breath 😂
Ah, retail memories. I had a case with bugs but the weirdest one, albeit a PC, was a Compaq SR5250NX with a freaking huge centipede inside, the owner was clueless in everything computing and the only info we had is that it was functioning and suddenly stopped soon after he noticed a "weird smell". Crazy.
Sounds like a friend of mine who had to replace the circuit board on his heating system because a bat of all things somehow crawled up underneath the board and got fried.
Last year at work someone had a filthy laptop, I cleaned it and he thought I gave him a brand new one
I told him, it's the same laptop, I wiped it down with some wipes (I was trying to find a polite way to tell him he's disgusting)
Thing looked like he used it as a plate
How many meals could you make out of it?
@@MrMario2011 too many
When people come in with a bug infested system, they are actually the "mothership", what do i mean by that? These kind off people are just squishing the bugs with their feet, hands, clothing or whatever. Whenever you squish a roach, you become an 'egg-carrier', everything you touch, walk over or sit down on, will have eggs, these are microscopic, people don't realise this. The moment somebody like this walks into your building, that's enough to create an infestation. Roaches don't even have to escape, and since game stores use a lot of carpets, that's the perfect scenario for a quick hatch of rhese eggs, because it is warm. This family thought it was funny, but in fact, they costed your store 1000's of dollars to desinfect every inch of the store. I know what i am talking about, i worked at a second hand shop, and we took in furniture, and would you know, there was furniture comming out of a place infested with roaches. They are the most resiliant pest on this planet. You can freeze them, starve them, burn them, but their eggs will always find a way to start a new infestation; I HATE roaches!
They truly are the most disgusting creatures, thanks for sharing the details!
I got a 360 bug infested that I found near a trash bin outside 4 years ago. Put it back in a sealed bag to make a video in the future. I think you just gave me the motivation to actually make that video 😆
Best of luck!
A Coworker of mine had me take a look at his dead PS4 that had a game stuck in the drive. I got the system at the start of my shift and threw it in my trunk in the middle of an Ohio winter. After my shift was over I got it home and took it out of the bag and a lethargic roach, still clinging to life, flopped onto my floor. Then a couple more slowly emerged from the vents. I quickly removed the disk, set the PS4 in my garage and fired off a bug bomb that happened to be handy for some reason and just prayed none of them were still in my house. If the family wasn't home the house probably would have been burned down instead.
That system needed to chill out outside, especially with the way your coworker treated it 🤢
@@MrMario2011 The fact that it sat outside likely saved my home from a roach infestation. The cold rendered them almost completely immobile. But It was still really disgusting.
I had a similar experience 3 years ago with an Xbox One S I bought on a garage sale! The console from the outside looked clean and in working order. Be aware, I never left my eyesight on that Xbox. While I was testing it, I saw a single roach coming out from it. Since my room is FULL of electronics, especially old consoles, you can imagine the outcome if I didn't notice. I quickly got a box, closed the console in there and tapped any single side and any single angle. Although I shouldn't clean my electronics besides the outer shells since I'm allergic to dust, I still do it because I need to take care of my stuff. But anyway, I never got experience in roach threatment on electronics, so I called a repair shop in my zone, and asked if they could take care of it. They did, the price was high, but oh boy, they did. I got the console back home, but the shock was so huge I put it in a box and double taped it again. I stil lhave the console. I don't think it has roaches in there anymore, but the shock still remains. I will eventually win my fear and open that box one day, hoping to not see any kind of surprises out of it.
tl;dr: Don't buy used consoles at garage sales, no matter their price. They could easily have roaches in there and that's gonna cost you more than the console itself. Especially if you don't notice at first. You can't really imagine the damage they could have done.
Also, small notice about roaches: They're VERY resistant and very sturdy. The repair shop who did it told me they used DDT and cleaned the whole mobo. Explained me they ATE the side of the mobo that was used to switch on the console and they had to use a jumper to get the console to turn on. I never noticed that at first, because I used the controller. Plus notice is that they're cannibals. They would eat themselves. This is why (even though your console was fully closed from BOTH sides, with basically no oxygen in it, with TWO plastic bags) after a few months it still had bugs in there.
Roaches are absolutely disgusting bugs, thank you for sharing that horrifying story. It sounds like that shop has been properly equipped.
love the stories man!! I would really love to see more of them in the near future also do you by chance have a playlist or something where I can easily find all the older story videos??
I do! I believe it's something like "Gameplay Commentaries & Random Stories"
@@MrMario2011 oh bet I will have to check it out thank you.
Welcome back, Xbox bug story.
Has it bugged you, too?
@@MrMario2011 Two years back, I had to deal with a roach PS4. The "solution" was to put it in 2-3 trash bags, followed by a multi-day vacation in a freezer. After freeing the internals of the corpses and giving the board a hella clean, the system somehow still works.
Now that bugged the hell out of me.
A couple years ago, i reoaired a playstation 3 that wouldn't boot. Stared taking it apart. Sheesh. Full of dead roaches. Was a friend of my sons. Poor kid was embarrassed as hell when we told him. The machine was full of bugs or "bugged" out lol
I hope you showed him plenty of photos
@MrMario2011 Haha, he seen them. I think the embarrassment made him stop hanging out with my son
Yeah, I agree. As bad as that system was, holding it for months before contacting the customer again updating them on the situation was not professional at all. You guys should have contacted them shortly after coming to the conclusion that you wouldn't work on it. This would have been beneficial to both parties, because the customer can get on with their lives, and your store wouldn't be as likely to get infestation.
Definitely agree.
I personally would of just told them No but i think one way to fix bug infested electronics is to place them in a bag and in a ice cold freezer with no food or drinks and wait a few months and let the bugs pass away
For sure, to my knowledge this was the first bug infested system we took in and we weren't equipped at all.
Understandable. I also would like to say that consoles are placed in garages for storage or to repair them. Garages can be perfect for repairing electronics as it's a perfect space for tool boxes and a solder station. But they need to be cleaned and sweeped. Also electronics need to be placed in containers so no dust builds up outside. Also needs to be tempted control with Air conditioning.
oh man, seeing this pop up in my recommended after i pried open my o.g. xbox just to find it's also been bug infested :<
not looking forward to when i have to clean that out, that's a task for another day since i just needed it's DVD drive
(also thanks for your videos on softmodding the xbox; i ended up doing a tsop flash too, though i borked it up by using cerbios, and had to save it w/ a burned DVD, hence the DVD drive lol)
DVD burning still helps all these years later!
I was just thinking of that story yesterday
Hope you enjoy the throwback, old friend 😂
Could have offered the customer a different system as a part of the offering as a shop to say it’s beyond repair but you can purchase one. The system shouldn’t have been accepted for repair
It’s interesting it still ran you could get someone to open it up outside with apron on and spray it out and dust it out
Wouldn't have been a bad idea, I did that with a few games I knew we had extra copies of but people bringing in their own copies to repair were too gouged or cracked to fix.
About going outside - After this apparently my boss did have to do that for one console he didn't know was infested. He went through, stomped out all the roaches (literally), cleaned it, fixed it up, but said never again 😂
oh look the guy that teached me how to mod my ps3 what a handsome man
Mr. Mario literally doing some debugging. (For the story I had the same experience with doing laptop repairs, roaches tons of them, I still have mental itches and paranoia thinking they are crawling somewhere).
I know EXACTLY what you're talking about with the mental itches 💀
sometimes i really wonder how extreme these people must live
i'm for example one of those meme-cat owners. even outside sheding season - fur everywhere! open the fridge - you see fur! my couch is like mandarin color - thick layer of his dark fur! so it's looks partially more anthracite-brown on his usually spots^^
meanwhile my eg ps4 (not in a closed shelf, so enough space to breath...and obiously for fur to get hin). it's launch silent oO like a year ago, i opened it out of curiosity (just in case), but barely any dust or fur
so literally, how do these people live 😨
As a dog owner myself, there's a difference between having a lived -in environment and having a filthy environment.
I kid you not, I used to get 50+ roach infested machines a week at a place I worked ( I was not allowed to refuse jobs).
The worst part is how itchy you get at the end of the day
Just FYI, you can fit A LOT of roaches in a Macbook Air
Oh man. I havent gotten one yet, but I have a feeling I will eventually.
Its perfectly acceptable to not take in infested consoles!
I really need to know what bug was making the noise.
I try not to think about it.
One time i buy a broken Xbox classic for parts and was terrble infested... I put it in plastic bag and spray it with bug killer, seal it and let it rest for a month
A good move right there!
I had a customer once, that stank like cockroaches, all his stuff was infested, including his clothes
NASTY
Yeah, retails sucks. Same memories and same feelings about the time when I was as a student in a PC store as technician and sometimes (in busy times) a salesperson in the main room. Repairing PCs was enjoyable, most of the time no customer was bugging me with questions, but talking to people and explain them again and again the same "half knowledge" salesperson have to have is annoying. My memories are a bit older than yours, a bit after the millennium. Windows ME was fading away and Windows XP available. And of course the mighty OG Xbox 🙂. These years made me what I'm today. A single player in work and gaming 🙂.
You guys over the ocean always make me laugh with stories about roaches. We don't have them here and also no other insects with these likes to infect a console. Besides some spiders, opening a console/PC is sometimes accompanied by dust + nicotine, but also not a pleasure to work on.
I had no idea Windows ME caught on anywhere enough to fade away 🤣 Thanks for sharing! It sounds like your environment is much better if you don't want roaches in your electronics.
I had a friend that needed a place tp stay.. i was trying to help him, so i let him stay..
He stayed for a few months. After awhile i noticed bugs (chroach fuks). unaware that his xbox 360 was infested..
He acted like he did not know.. it took me months to get them out..
I had to tell him tok leave to inorder to full removes all the bugs. . Thats not even a joke .. i couldn't get them out so long as he was there too..
But yea ...
That's vile, but it's so difficult and expensive to get rid of those bugs.
That's nasty. Who stores game consoles in a garage smh
Deffo odd parents. As a kid in 00s I had some friends' parents who would store stuff away the nanosecond they stopped using them. Like dude just keep it under the TV unit
That's what I never understood, especially with how new the console was. It would have been less than a year old at that point.
Imagine if that kid is watching the video now, how he would react, Will he comment ? what he would tell you 😃
That would require him to out himself as the owner of one of the nastiest consoles I've seen 💀
Thats funny, I purchased a Gears of War edition 360 from Mercari and it arrived full of roaches.
I sent him images and he sent me a full refund and told me to keep it.
You did the seller a favor getting it out 😂
But the PS5 doesn't have any games, so it makes perfect sense to put it in a garage to let it collect dust / bugs. Lol, JK.
But seriously, i don't think you compromised your professionalism by reacting to a visibly disgusting object. I a reasonable attempt has to be made to bring the console to a place in a presentable way. In this case, bring it in a sack. Disclose there are insects in it. If you saw the bugs from the grill, there's no way the kids couldn't have noticed the same thing, or their strange mother at the very least.
Thanks for confirming! Although you'll be surprised at how oblivious people are...
i love you lilly i love dogs :)
They're the best!
This is why stupid people shouldn't have things.
Accurate 😂
Nope nope nope
The right answer.