How To Get Ants Out of a Laptop

I’ve experienced various buggy software and at times buggy hardware in my life but never have I had real bugs crawling in and out of a laptop.  In 2016 I moved to Thailand  for a couple months.  During that time we stayed at a number of hotels in  the city of Chiang Mai.

Chiang Mai is a tropical city that is  lush with palm trees , the fresh scent of flowering jasmine and the famous stinky fruit called durian. Unknown to me one hotel room had a colony of ants residing on the desk. Most likely they were drawn from some previous guests sugary drink. As usual I plugged in my laptop to charge it overnight.  Unknown to me, the ants moved in.

I didn’t know this at the time but ants are attracted to electro-magnetic devices. That morning at breakfast I noticed ants on the table.  Later that day I noticed them at the pool. And at the coffee shop. At first I thought it odd that the city was rife with ants. But slowly it dawned on me one  common thread. Wherever I took my laptop, I saw ants. And there they were,  climbing in and out of the USB ports and hinge of the laptop.  How can this be?

To my surprise this is a common event in Southeast Asia. There was all kind of advice online. The first thing I tried was to place the laptop over water and build a bridge to dry land. Supposedly the ants will automatically use the bridge and leave on their own accord.  This was hard to do in a hotel but I built a little lake in the shower.  This did not work.

I tried pushing the ants away each time I saw one. But they but they kept reappearing. How many ants are in this device? Mind you the laptop was working great the entire time.

Finally I read an article that recommended placing the laptop in the hot sun. It was the end of the rainy season in Chiang Mai but one day the clouds broke and sun came out. I took the laptop to sunny spot and set it on the table.

Lo and behold the ants found the heat too uncomfortable. At first I wanted brush them away as they came out.  But I decided to be patient. I let them work at their own accord. One ant after another, explored a path out. Soon they formed a column and marched out like Napoleon retreating from Moscow.

It took a couple hours but in the end every single ant left the laptop. There must have been hundreds of them. And since then I’ve not seen a single ant. I’m typing this on my laptop right now and it’s working great.

What’s the moral of the story?  If it Ant broke, fix it!