I used to feel smart and pleased with myself when I used to be able to fix “computer problems” – that all encompassing term that covers a multitude of sins, neglects, marmalades in the floppy drives (that time was sabotage, and my child-like revenge against the sugary assassin was brutal) and general confusions.
I am faced this morning with a wonky hard drive. Only about 8 months old, brought new from a reputable dealer. It refuses to let me access the files thereon. It had been acting strangely for a while – slow data rates, jerky playback of video from it. My computer makes an odd beep from time to time that I can’t figure out. I threw on some disk monitoring software and it said something about SMART something or other having changed. I didn’t understand, so I picked up another hard drive on the offchance it blew up. So I could back my stuff up. Too late.
The language I use to describe the problem gives away my disdain. I don’t care to poke around in a thousand utilities to repair my hard drive. I demand blood. Sure, if I sat down and decided to edumacate myself about hard drives, SATA this, and Fixdisk that, then I could probably work out if it was my controller, the drive, or the fault of the King of Spain, but quite frankly, I don’t care to. Is that unreasonable? I ain’t gettin on no plane.
“Oh sure Garreth, you drive the car, but don’t you think that you need to know how the engine works?”
“Fuck you. I use knives and forks, and I don’t know how to forge steel.” I’m a fork user. I’m not, nor do I ever want to be, a fork engineer, fork forger, and more than that, I’m not a fucking fork quality tester. I buy a fork, I stick it in a sausage, and that’s that. Why can’t hard drives be more like forks?
So I randomly chose the first piece of software I could find that had the words data and recovery in the title, and I’ve spent the last six hours trying not to watch the progress bar on creating a disk image reach 48 per cent. L a m e.
If Mr. Maxtor ever invites me around to his house, he can expect to be smelling sausages rotting in his attack for weeks after. Just like that sucker who put marmalade in my floppy drive and deleted some of the Windows system files. And that’s not the half of it. I pity the fool.