Being too busy with work (see "Feature charging at full speed ahead") has meant that I've not been able to share some of the really good gems of my last couple of months of being approached by coworkers, relatives, and every random idiot on the 'net who someone gives my AIM login info or e-mail address to. Since I quit two weeks ago, I'm starting to remember what free time is, and so I'll share some now.
Gem number 1: I'm about to have a data recovery client. I often get this type of work from people being rather stupid, but this guy takes the cake. He wanted to keep his visiting parents from snooping on his computer, so he boots DSL, and uses it to zero the drive's partition table. Without bothering to back it up or at least run fdisk and write things down.
2 500GB hard drives: About $160. Glow in the dark SATA cables: I have no idea, I don't buy that crap. Having to send me five hundred bucks because you think your parents will be shocked by a 40 year old single man having pornography on his computer: Priceless.
Gem number 2: I'm about to have a second data recovery client. This one is not quite as bad as the first one, I think... RAID6 array, or he'd be screwed. Eight IDE drives. He accidentally set two of them to 'master' on the channel, so two drives are, well. Scrambled. The RAID driver goes, "HEY!!! I see two identical drives, you got hardware problems, I won't mount this thing!"
When he realizes the problem, he promptly shuts down the machines, removes all jumpers from all drives, yanks out the cables, then suddenly realizes he has no idea which two drives were both set to master. And so they are now in a FedEx box en route to me.
Gem number 3: I'm about to have a third data recovery client. The lesson this guy teaches, folks, is that IDE cables are keyed for a reason, and when it's upside down, it doesn't go in for a reason, and forcing it in and thus ripping a pin clean off the drive connector is really a bad idea. (I get about one of these a year. Clearly, it must be posted publicly more.)
Gem number 4: My mother is trying to self publish something at the office. I try to walk her through her options. I make this easy, by telling her only one option. She then goes to the computer store, and gets confused by a helpful salesman.
My mother is now the proud owner of about $500 worth of CD burning crap, because she bought one of everything the store carried. She has no blank CDs, and no burner. However, she does have the USB flash drives I told her to buy in the first place.
And lastly, gem number 5: A former data recovery client of mine "saw the light" and decided he'd never need that expensive service again. Since his problem is he changed the password to his encrypted filesystem and can't remember what he changed it to, I can't really help him. His RAID-1 array using 1 data drive and seven mirrors didn't help him either.