In the five years I’ve been a network administrator/computer repairman, I’d yet to have any computers catch fire on me. I’ve seen power supplies fried by others. I’ve heard power supplies fried by others. I’ve smelled – well, you get the picture. I once had a monitor catch fire while I was teaching. (Simply unplugging it put out the fire.) But today, I got to have a REAL power supply fire! Flames and everything!

It was an old 233MHz machine that I had turned on looking to see if there was anything that needed saving off the hard drive. It had just finished its POST when I heard snaps, crackles, and pops and then saw fire. I turned off the power strip that the computer was plugged into and rushed into my computer lab for the CO₂ fire extinguisher. Alas, by the time I returned, the fire was out. I sprayed it anyhoo. (Actually, I sprayed the one next to it first, accidentally.)

So now I’ve had a real computer fire – pretty cool. (Well, cool in that it wasn’t *my* computer and there wasn’t a lot of collateral damage, especially to *me*.)

The hard drive, BTW, didn’t have anything useful on it after all. I ended up reformatting it and using it in one of the first grade rooms.