I'm glad I'm not the only one who is anal about using flush-cutting nippers for cable ties, and cutting them off as close as possible to make them less lethal!
When I started out doing industrial electronics, most of the cabinets I worked in had their cable ties cut by electricians with the dykes in their trusty Klein lineman's pliers. So they left a quarter inch or so protruding, and razor sharp from the blades on those cutters.
My hands, wrists, and arms got so bloody that I vowed to never use normal dykes to trim cable ties EVER. It's just cruel.
And I second the complaints about using electrical tape to hold a roll of wire together. Just nasty!
The IT guys and I where I used to work decided that the matrix of what we called "pork chop grease and cat hair" was one of the biggest threats to electronic gear. It blocks off cooling fins, screens, and stops fans from turning very well!
Have any of you ever done any work in laboratories? Hydrochloric acid fumes are amazing. It eats copper and really any of the usual conductors and contact materials. A year-old PC can look like it was just recovered from the wreck of the Titanic!
And those acid fumes also do something to drive the plasticizers out of vinyl and other plastics. You end up with a clear ooze the consistency of honey covering every bit of wire and cable. It doesn't wash off of your hands, and heaven knows what it does to you. We always just called it "lab goo".
In the oilfield, you often encounter hydrogen sulfide gas. That eats copper, silver, etc., most efficiently. And gold-plating sucks in an H2S or hydrochloric acid fume environment.
Gold is always plated so thin that it leaves microscopic pores. The gas enters the pores, finds the base metal below, and just eats it away.
I've worked on telemetry RTUs that were easy to troubleshoot because the problem was the ICs whose legs had been completely eaten off, leaving the chips laying all over the bottom of the enclosure. The ICs with tin plated legs were fine, but those with gold-plated leads were the ones that had their legs munched off!
The lesson there is always use tin plated connector pins and sockets, and ICs, and always use tinned stranded wire when building anything for use in a lab or in the oilfield. Stay away from gold or silver plated anything!
Off topic, I know. Just some pet peeves from years of making this stuff work in harsh atmospheres.
was not a very graceful landing by no means and the injuries received were from those dam attic rats. 
