Sometime around August or September of 2013, I attended a call at a nursing home with an MX2300N colour machine. At first glance I could see something was off, there were dark liquid spill stains on the machine. No big deal, or so I thought. I opened the front door and then it hit me; the smell of moldy old coca-cola. They had spilled a lot of it right on the top of the front door, the very narrow gap between the front door and the frame of the machine.
Rather than doing the logical thing and, you know, clean it up; they opted to leave it there. A little clean up, a minute to clear my head of the obsessive compulsive demons demanding I go wash my hands because god only knows what else could be growing here. I then made the mistake of looking for more of this mess, because the path of carnage did not stop at the front door, looking at the spill pattern (thank you CSI) I could see the spill continued on its gravity fed downward path. That was when I opened up the paper trays... Big mistake.
Under the lift plate of both trays, in the small cavity between the base of the tray and the lift plate, the coke had settled into its nice dark humid spot and grew bacterial colonies at the base of the paper trays. What would have originally just been a pool of coke in the trays had congealed into a thick, syrupy, mess of mold and bacteria. I told them I would not be cleaning it up and could bring replacement paper trays next time I'm in the area if they wished, but the manager of the site (who had been on vacation the last few weeks and had just returned the day of my visit) said the staff would be cleaning up their mess as they should have done originally.
It was pretty satisfying to hear they would be cleaning up the mess they should have cleaned up in the first place; I didn't have any rubber/plastic gloves that would have permitted me to clean it up myself (OCD, even while managed, is still a terrible, terrible thing). Presently the weirdest thing I've found inside a copier; can't say it compares to some of the other things I've read in this thread but definitely weird/gross in its own right.
Oh, and there was also a call in the boonies of the southern end of the province where a secretary had lost a pendant from a necklace inside her copier. She didn't bother to look herself but damned if anyone else even thought about touching that machine while her pendant was trapped inside it. A pitbull's lockjaw couldn't compare to this secretary fighting off staff to keep them away from the copier.
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