Ages ago, I had the owner of a business I supported tell me I could remote into his computer any time that day, it would be available to me. I remoted in about 5 minutes after that call and he was amidst some fullscreen hardcore pornography. I respect that sort of move.
Told my colleague immediately as he was at the other end of the work bench, then told my manager. They called the cops who told us to leave it alone, then immediately made their way over to confiscate the PC and take a copy of the job booking slip.
Never heard another thing about it after that. We thought we might be called as witnesses or to give statements, but nothing. The cops took a few mins with the PC when they got there, asked us to log into it and then leave the room. We figured they had enough on it and the guy probably admitted it. Never saw the customer again either, and he was a fair bit of a regular.
That's the wildest part to me. You'd think if you're into that kind of stuff you'd learn to repair your own equipment that hosts some of the most illegal content one could possess.
Asked by a mother to recover family photos from her deceased son's laptop. Fortunately I noticed and removed the porn folders before passing over the USB stick.
The one thing I absolutely hate doing is getting inside my mom's computer. She's a heavy chain smoker and everything is covered in yellow tar.
I feel this. The most disgusting thing I've ever had to do was clean my chain-smoking parents' house after their passing so we could put it up for sale. I can vividly imagine what the inside of a smoker's PC must look like, just based on that experience.
I worked for a pipe smoker in the 90s. He left his computer uncovered. The bottom of the case was completely covered in ash. I have no idea how that computer stayed working.
Somewhere I have a picture of it saved, but as a Sys Admin for an office one person had so much dead skin piled on their mouse I gagged. It formed the shape of their fingers on the buttons and the dead skin was, not exaggerating, like 4-5 millimeters thick of caked-on yellow disgustingness. Mind you, we provide new mice for people to use in the office for any reason, they just need to let us know and ask. There was no reason for this other than the person just being a Nurgle initiate or some shit. People are gross.
I don't know if it is the kind of "worst" you were thinking about, but in a previous helpdesk job I found a text file on a users desktop with a bunch of links. Asked the user what that was for, and they used it tonremember web sites. They were star struck when I showed them that bookmarks were a thing, and added their links as bookmarks for them to get started.
All the internals of one laptop I opened were really covered in oil, the fans were totally stuck and unable to spin (maybe the main reason why they sent it to us) and the whole thing really stank. I called the customer to ask how was that possible and to inform that those defects weren’t covered by our warranty and they told me it was used in a restaurant’s kitchen, and they didn’t understand why they couldn’t use it there.
It was the client. I had reason to believe that she was an escort using them for online marketing. We had a number of women come through with similar situations. One guy had a bunch of nudes of women and I clocked him as likely a pimp.
Not really bad, but it's one that stuck with me: The computer owner had a bit of an obsession with David Boreanaz. Wallpaper was him with his shirt off. The desktop was cluttered with tons of image files, all him.
Lady at the company I did IT for had her work computer desktop filled with cringey memes she had made about being a "Trump Girl", "Guns, God, Glory" "America First" etc. Her social media account was logged into on there as well and was all a bunch of boomer pro Trump memes and Religious stuff.
Had to awkwardly tell somebody that I needed to use a different keyboard to work on their computer because theirs was so disgusting. It was filled with dandruff flakes, several of the keys stuck slightly because of the thin coating of grease from all the food they ate at their desk. Hair bits stuck up from the keys, it was absolutely nasty.
I used to work for a company that has offices in a strictly Islamic country. I had to install something on one of those HP mini servers and found a very interesting search history. No cp fortunately, as far as I could tell. I cleared it and told my boss, but since we were going to get rid of these office servers and moving everything to the cloud I don't think anything ever came of it.
Imagine watching porn on the company server.
Anyway that night I had dinner at the house of the manager in whose office the server was installed. It was a very traditional dinner where the women served the men and stayed in the kitchen otherwise. Strange experience altogether.
Worked in a PC repair shop. Got an all in one Mac in. Fixed it. Cleaned it up. It's a good show piece for customers to see. Guy comes in with his kid. 5 minutes into transaction I suddenly notice, over his shoulder, the Mac owner's porn collection playing on the screen. Ask customer to read fine print and do a quick move to wake up the Mac.
I had to fix one on a construction site. I opened it up and it was full of dust from all the brickwork they had been doing. As in, nearly completely full of it. I bet their lungs looked the same too :(