Sneaky Murphy

At about 11 am on Friday last week, I faced a bumbling IT homosapien, who, much to my annoyance decided that he would stand right before me and smiled away for a good 10 minutes while looking AT me as he held my damaged hard drive in his hand.

Yes. My hard drive completely crashed the night before unexpectedly, after waiting for a few hours for the IT guys in my company to attend to me since 8 am on a Friday morning, they finally sent me a rather junior person 3 hours later, only for him to come back to me within the hour, (get this!) grinning from ear to ear as he informed me that the hard drive was “very damaged”.

Yes. I knew that could have been the reason (or why else had my laptop decided that it will no longer boot up). But what I wanted to know was if it was damaged, what can they do to help restore my data or, given that it was all my fault for not backing my stuff up, what steps should I take from there on. I knew it was my fault and I am willing to pay for any external data services required if deem so, and all I needed was some concrete info which I can follow up on in my time.

Unable to answer my question and instead of getting someone else to attend to me, there he stood, smiling his million smiles, scratching his head away and continue smiling as he struggled to tell me in English that it was damaged as he kept on pointing to the drive on my laptop.

I kept my cool, but I was seething. And for the 10th time, explained my questions to him. Slowly and as calmly as I possibly could. And all he did was continue smiling. There and then, I wanted to wring his neck and throw him out of the 24th floor!

Excuse me, I’ve been racing against time working on a deadline and just lost 10 years of work plus personal stuff which included my CV and pictures of Spud that was categorised by weeks and months from the time she was born, and then, all this person did was just returned my hard drive and grinned from ear to ear because he could not answer my questions?!

It was probably the most annoying reaction a Thai can give to anyone. They have no solution and no clue, so they smiled, hoping that the other person (me in this case) would just go away and move on. (They finally got another IT person to attend to my case after I lodged a complaint right after. To cut the story short, Super IT Guy reverted to me just a couple of days ago with a brand new drive in my laptop AND managed to save 100% of the data in my damaged hard drive (YIPPEE!), for which I am really, very thankful for!)

So, one of the reasons I have been quiet in the last one week was simply because I spent last weekend moping over the unprecedented incident with no laptop whatsoever. Technically, I went through the 7 stages of grief (shock, denial bargaining, guilt, anger, depression, acceptance & hope) within a few hours the moment Super IT Guy came to take back the drive as I mourned for the loss of my hard drive. In fact, I think I went straight to Stage 5 & 7, skipping the rest altogether.

I got angry mainly because of the fact that only the night before, Silver Bullet and I, both agreed to set some time after work the next day to back up all my stuff into his workstation. Funny how Murphy likes to show up at the most appropriate time --- my laptop crashed while I was working in the taxi; I was less than 10 minutes away from home!

Come to think of it, despite getting to the acceptance stage, I actually have lost all hope of getting any of my data back. At that point, I started psyching myself up to move on and be prepared to start building up everything again as there was a big chance that I would lose everything. Those very thoughts also made me lose further motivation to blog like I always do.

And then, since then, I just have been insanely busy with no time to spare for anything else since I got my laptop back.

Now I’m back!

And I make sure that I have everything backed-up. TWO locations no less! All I need to do is to remember to do so frequently before Murphy does another unexpected visit.