Dell users say their laptops smell like cat urine
If it smells like cat urine, it must be cat urine -- right? A handful of Dell users recently found out that the source of a foul smell in their homes was actually coming from their laptops.
A handful of Dell users took to customer service forums this summer to complain about laptops smelling like cat urine. A forum post by a user named Three West claimed that his new Dell Lattitude 643u smelled like it was "assembled near a tomcats litter box."
Soon other users were complaining that the laptops smelled like "cat urine" -- some even blamed their cats for defiling their computers.
"One night, I was working on a new unit and I thought for sure that the guy in the next cube who has a cat brought the cat into work and it urinated on the floor. Smelled just like that. Took me about an hour to determine that the foul odor was coming from the new laptop," one customer wrote.
"I have been blaming a new kitten who I swore was creeping into my closed back pack at night and magically only hitting the PC with a concentrated urine stream which then magically evaporated," another user wrote.
But it wasn't their feline friend that was responsible for the offensive odor. According to Dell customer service technicians, the smell was coming from the computers.
Dell's corporate communications did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but a customer service tech responded to forum members by saying:
"What we do know at this time is that this smell is absolutely not urine or any other type of biological material. The parts have been tested and we have confirmed this 100 percent. The smell is caused by a manufacturing process which has now been changed and we are confident that the issue is resolved for all new E6430u currently shipping."
Perhaps one forum user put it best, saying, "apologies to the cat."
