3 inches of water in a basement is easily 20-30 gallons or more depending on the size. Did he offer to help pay for any of the cleanup?

Huh, that night sky trick sounds smart, I might have to try that myself.

learned this the hard way too - seems like half the stuff in life looks totally different once you actually get it home, whether it's paint or clothes or even furniture.

90% of people I know just wipe the gold pins with a dry cloth and never had a problem. @blair_butler47 is way overstating this whole oil thing. Skin oil is mostly water and salt, it's not some kind of acid that melts metal instantly. If your RAM fried, it was probably from static electricity or just bad luck with the stick itself. Computer parts are tougher than people give them credit for. I've grabbed PCIe cards by the connector more times than I can count and everything still works fine. The real danger is bending the pins or dropping the part, not a little oil from your fingertips.

Sam Harris is right about not going crazy with the water, but he's a bit off about just misting the burner tubes. You really don't want to spray the tubes at all if you can help it. Water inside the burner tubes can cause flash rusting and mess with your gas flow. I actually found that out the hard way after I started getting rough idling on my forge and had to pull the tubes to clean them out. Just focus the mist on the refractory lining itself, especially any hairline cracks you see forming, and keep the spray away from the burner openings.