You won't blow the chip on the board, I've seen so many of those plugs kicked out over the years, you have to power off and back on. At worst case there is a tiny micro fuse on the board that could get blown, I've soldered those back on once or twice but never seen one blown from unplugging the mouse.

I've found my ferro-rod on the side of the magnesium bar deteriorated almost 25% to a white dust in the car BOB once. Using an airtight container with silica gel pouch for all of them now (should do that for the spare bic lighters too).

Another time, when needed to deal with some ice, I've unpacked my car BOB just to realize that my Gerber folding shovel is almost useless, because I didn't check its condition in the unfolded position after a friend of mine has borrowed it once (like a year before the event).

With the PC mouse again. A while ago there were a trend in the ergonomic design with the silky rubber inserts on some of the high end models. After about 3 years in the drawer the rubber was like eaten by something (maybe mold, maybe natural decomposition, maybe an underneath glue diffusion). The surface became slimy and sticky, impossible to clean. I had to throw all 3 to the garbage.

Eugene. Okay. Maybe the fuse these days, right. But in the past I had this problem at least 4 times with the old Dell workstations and too smart students. In one case it was the chip on the keyboard, in other 3 - the motherboard was replaced (well, Dell said so). Perhaps, that happens on PS/2 mouse hot plug, not unplug. Or under some other specific circumstances (i.e. some buttons on the keyboard were depressed during connection). Better be safe than sorry.

Don't keep dead mice in a drawer. They stink.

Sue

As a puter tech I can tell some stories.

But recently I was swapping the DWs wife pc to Windows 7 from a "borrowed" version of XP. I loaded a clean copy of XP after saving all her stuff on an external drive. Then did the upgrade, worked like magic, no problems, life was good. Of course, this was when my PC decided the power supply in it had reached the day after warranty and decided to act up, a lot. Luckily I had one power supply left floating around, so instead of loading programs, I was swapping out a power module. If it's not one thing, it's another.

And yeah, I can relate to the lighters. None of the ones I had in our kits was any good after only 18 months. So I swapped them all out. Gonna do the vacuum pack thing on all of them. Fact is, I am considering vacuum packing most of the gear, just for giggles. A lot of it won't degrade. The stuff that does get date marked for replacement.

Those 'seized' Bics will usually work again if you disassemble them. Sometimes if you force the wheels to spin by working it across your belt or a piece of wood. The flints and carbon steel wheel are highly dissimilar metals can corrode together if moisture is present. Salt-water mist, sometime just being near the ocean, is enough to cause them to bind up.

Sealing them in a way that excludes moisture should help. But regular, every week or so, exercise/use seemed often enough to me. I lived near the water and even occasional smokers didn't seem to have any problems.

I have experimented with silicone spray but while the idea would seem to have merit on its face I haven't done it consistently enough to be sure it was doing any good. Didn't seem to hurt. Except for that time I tried the lighter before the solvent hadn't dissipated. I was able to blow it out but it was a bit more flame than I had desired.

"Gonna do the vacuum pack thing on all of them."

Just don't forget to put the little notch in the edge for opening. I hate forgetting that...

Sue

Stale tape with the adhesive cooked off because it was stored in a hot place and lots of flashlights with dead batteries.

Add sun rotted poly rope to the list.

Corrosion inhibitor chips-

http://www.midwayusa.com/viewproduct/?productnumber=154282

A couple of these in your Bic baggie should reduce the corrosion of the wheel and flint. Should work for flints too. Or anything steel that you want to minimize corrosion during storage.

I've seen these in the boxes that reloading dies come in. No picture on the website but these are little one-inch squares of what looks like white cardboard impregnated with something that reduces corrosion in air.

Yeah the TP when DWs brother and niece came in for the holidays. Geesh, i thought they were using it for toweling off after a shower.

I had three serial cables go bad in a day, when I needed them to access a console port on a switch. My customer had a good serial cable, so I knew that my serial port and settings were correct.

I went for years without any sort of need to change a tire on the side of the road -- heck, I went through two entire cars with 125K miles each on them without that. Then in April '09 I lost two tires at the same time in my new car. That was an expensive day.

Another time, I went through all the spare server memory and several spare servers one night about sixteen years ago trying to get a server back online before the busiest day of the year. I had a humongous collection of server and workstation components, but for all of the tens of thousands of dollars of stuff, we couldn't put it together to make a working Novell server.

My boss wouldn't have fired me so much as executed me and left my head on a pike as a warning to others if we hadn't gotten back online. I called one of my staff after eight continuous hours of troubleshooting, at just about midnight. I'll call him J.

cm: "Hey, J. I hear that you got a new PCI SCSI card for your gaming PC."

J: "Yeah, it's really neat! It's an Adaptec blah de blah..."

cm: "I want it."

J: "You can't have it! I got a great deal on it and --"

cm: "GOD DAMN IT J! I WILL BUY YOU ANY SCSI CARD YOU WANT! IN THE MORNING! WHEN THE STORES ARE OPEN! I NEED YOUR SCSI CARD NOW!"

J: "Oh, sure, no problem, I'll pull it out and bring it in to the office right now.

There's a reason that my nom-de-website is "chaosmagnet".