Here's a bit of a note guys. If you go into a place that does service, be it on your car, or your computer, or even just your vacuum, please realize that the person behind the counter is being paid, day in and day out, to know about what they are working on. That's their job. That's all they're expected to do. Know how to figure out what's wrong, and how to fix it. Well, and then fix it, of course.
With that out of the way, here's a little story about a particularly insistent and impatient customer that I had this last Friday. Now, this gentlemen had been in about a month prior with a laptop that he said was overheating. According to him, the issue had been around for a few months.
Unfortunately, he waited to bring it to me until it had already stopped booting. By that point, the damage had been done, and short of putting a new motherboard in a laptop that was almost a decade old, there wasn't anything I could do. So, I pulled his hard drive, sold him an external box for it, and put the drive in it. Quick, easy, done.
He returned on the Friday in question with the drive, saying nothing he plugged it into would recognize it. So, I plugged it in, and sure enough, no drive was detected. So, I started running a little program on it.
Bit of info, what I assumed was wrong was that the partition info had been lost. On a hard drive, Windows and other operating systems create what is called a partition, the actual usable space on a hard drive where all your programs and pictures go.
The software that I decided to run was a little utility that scans through the drive looking for indications of the beginning and ends of partitions to try and rebuild the partition table. It runs a bit like checkdisk, checking the entire drive. Now, my customer absolutely insisted that it was wasted time, that the partition info is at the beginning of the drive, and nowhere else. That there are no markers or anything elsewhere. He refused to listen to me about it. He backed all of this up by saying he used to write the device drivers for hard drives.
For DOS and UNIX...
In the 80's...
Needless to say, this was more than a little frustrating.
I no longer knew how to identify with this man. Did he think that technology stopped progressing after he left the industry? Did he believe that they never made any real, tangible changes to file systems since the 80's? How could I explain how this worked to a man who believed that computer tech from the 80's was so incredibly streamlined and secure that nobody had modified it in the last few decades?
Spoiler alert: I couldn't. Nobody could.
No matter how many times I said that they had changed that, that the markers were added in for redundancy, he insisted that these markers just did not exist, regardless of the fact that I'd probably know a bit better, since I'd been working on them in this millennium.
It got better though. After the first hour and a half, he said, "Oh, wait, I remember now, we added in a backup of the partition tables in an unknown sector in the middle of the drive!"
WHAT?! Do you even know what you're saying?! How would you even do that?! Partitions take up entire, concurrent spaces on the drive, you can't just pick up a few sectors right in the middle, use them for something else, and expect the partition to just continue on and ignore it! And what's this 'unknown' crap? Even if you could do that, operating systems would have to know where that sector is so that it wouldn't use it. If the sector is different for different models of drives, and unknown, then most operating systems would just write over it! And even if it was known, any drives newer than the operating system you're installing would be rendered useless.
It was truly absurd. And, throughout all this lovely banter, I had to bite my tongue so hard that I'm amazed it wasn't bleeding. While we were waiting, he started wading into topics such as politics, religion, racism, you name it. All topics on which I stand pretty much polar opposite from him. All while telling me how much more he knew about my job than I did, and doing his best to invalidate the experience I have.
Sir, if you know so much about how this stuff works, why did you even bring me the drive? Why did you even bring me the laptop, while we're at it? Why did you, someone who knows so much about this field, not think that maybe just letting it overheat for months might cause a bit of damage that couldn't be fixed with just a bit of heat-sink compound and a reload of windows?
It...
Was...
Infuriating...
After three hours at this, the issue was finally zeroed in on and fixed, and he got the data he wanted. Three fricking hours.
Did I mention he came in at 6 o'clock? Yeah. I should have left at 7. Instead, I was stuck there dealing with someone who thought they knew everything, actually knew nothing, and could not be bothered to part from the drive overnight so I could fix it and work on other stuff until 9.
It was very nice to come home to my hounds, even if they were all starving and crying to go out.
So, dear readers, please, I beg of you. Don't do this sort of stuff to people that work in the repair industries. These people get paid to do their job for a reason. Let them, and listen to them.
Unless they work at a certain tech company that operates out of a big store with a price-tag shaped logo. Avoid that place. They really don't know what they're talking about.
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