dumbfounding form a moral angle, but that can be a good thing.

So instead I kicked my foot throw a running box fan that my roommate used to simulate a running semi-truck while I was sleeping. About 5 good kicks to the center of the fan alleviated most of my anger and I went back to drinking mountain dew and playing counterstrike. Several minutes later I noticed a funny smell. I had neglected to unplug the corpse of the fan after my outburst and it had started on fire in the middle of the room…
…So I threw it down the stairwell. Needless to say my roommate was dismayed when I told him that his fan spontaneously started on fire - must’ve been because he never turned it off. Fans aren’t meant to be on 24/7.
-Chris

I did the mass x velocity calculation, and figured I couldn’t generate enough kinetic energy to inflict spectacular damage by hurling them across a room (any room) against a wall.

Yeah, I’d likely break ‘em, but that wasn’t exactly the issue. My goal was to subject these horrible pieces of machinery to the maximum amount of destructive force available.

Ergo, the roof.

One glorious summer evening when coworkers and other personnel had departed, your intrepid writer dragged all seven workstations up to the roof level (11 floors above a parking lot) after weighing one as a sample. While recovering my breath I did a back of the envelope calculation just to see if physics supported my hypothesis that any of these hideous pieces of junk would basically explode upon impact with terra firma some 150 odd feet below (at an average of 14 feet per story in that development).

The back of the envelope calculation went something like this:

An object which is falling through the atmosphere is subjected to two external forces. One force is the gravitational force, expressed as the weight of the object. The other force is the air resistance, or drag of the object. The motion of any object can be described by Newton’s second law of motion, force F equals mass m times acceleration a:

F = m * a

which can be solved for the acceleration of the object in terms of the net external force and the mass of the object:

a = F / m

Weight and drag are forces which are vector quantities. The net external force F is then equal to the difference of the weight W and the drag D

F = W - D

The acceleration of a falling object then becomes:

a = (W - D) / m

The magnitude of the drag is given by the drag equation. Drag D depends on a drag coefficient Cd, the atmospheric density r, the square of the air velocity V, and some reference area A of the object.

D = Cd * r * V ^2 * A / 2

Then I realized with awful certainty that I was fucked. Insufficient means for declaring several of the variables existed, thus I couldn’t approach this from a rigidly scientific perspective.

Deprived of the mathematical basis for predicting destruction, I went to the fall back position of human instinct and predictive resonance.

“If I throw a 15lb piece of equipment off a roof approximately 150 ft up, will it fragment upon impact with the ground”

[pause for thought of indeterminate length lubricated by consumption of several large cans of beer]

“Yes”

Whereupon I hurled the first offender in an arc like trajectory (so that it would tend to accelerate before beginning its final fall to earth).

Approximately 11 seconds later, impact occurred, and gentle readers, I shit you not - the workstation utterly disintegrated. The case burst open and the contents were forcibly ejected in an impact field of almost 10 feet in circumference.

Over the course of this magnificent summer evening I consumed approximately a case of beer, and when the intellectual muse seemed to coincide with;

a) the natural beauty of the sunset
b) the end of a few (more) cans of adult beverage

I leisurely lobbed another workstation over the parapet and raced to the “impact observation platform”.

By the end of the evening, I felt considerably better. A certain zen-like state of mind seemed to exist. Now this may have been because I had inhaled almost 12 liters of extremely potent brewski’s, or all invasive stress elements had been ritualistically purged by destruction of formerly useful workstations. So Brian, you were correct in surmising that considerable frustration can be expelled by the judicious wrecking of computing equipment.

I have to add one tiny caveat however; PC’s - yes OK, but monitors…OH HELL YES!!