When bad hard drives happen to good people

Scene: "Genius Bar" at Clarendon Apple Store, 3:30pm

Apple Guy (AG): Is Jamy here?

Jamy: Yes.

AG: What seems to be the problem?

Jamy: It won't turn on all the way and it's making a funny noise. I'm afraid it may be the hard drive. [I put the computer on the counter and turn it on.]

AG: Hmm, do you not get past the spinning wheel?

Jamy: No. I ran a diagnostic this morning and it took three hours. This is what it told me. [I show him the piece of paper where I wrote down the diagnostic results.]

AG: You wrote it down? [He seems amused.]

Jamy: Yes. Also, it's making a funny noise.

AG: [putting his ear on the wrong side of the computer] I don't hear anything…well, there's something. Are you sure you don't have a disk in there?

Jamy: I'm sure. I had this disk in there earlier [holding up diagnostic disk], but I took it out. There's nothing in there.

AG: Maybe it's the fan.

Jamy: No, it's not the fan. This is a new and completely different noise than it's ever made before.

AG: I believe you. [His tone is doubtful.] Let's see what happens when I run the disk repair utility. [It takes a while and he helps someone else. Guess what, it doesn't work.] You may want to buy Disk Warrior© to try and recover the hard drive.

Jamy: But if the hard drive is gone, it probably won't help.

AG: Maybe not.

Jamy: I'm not convinced that the problem isn't the hard drive.

[ AG finishes up with the customer while I pace around, annoyed.]

Jamy: Can you hear the noise now? [It's gotten much louder.]

AG: Oh, yeah. Oh, it's definitely the hard drive. You were right. Let me see if we have one in stock.

They did not have the right hard drive in stock, thus little baby computer is wending its way to a repair facility in some other part of the country. Unlike past repairs, the recovery from this one will be painful. When I get the computer back, it will only have what it came with originally. It won't have all the programs I've added and use every day. It won't have the most recent version of the OS. It will take me days and possibly weeks to get everything back the way I have it now. I am rather downhearted about this and eating an ice cream cone on the way back to the office did little to cheer me up.

Sigh. I feel silly that I'm so blue about it. Oy, but all that work of setting it up, getting the wireless router to work, reinstalling MS Office—do I even have a copy of the OS? Or did I leave it in Seattle with Mom? I just don't want to spend my time this way. I want things back the way they were! I didn't even screw it up. As the Apple Guy said, sometimes hard drives fail. And I will have to accept that and move on. It's not a tragedy it's just a big, fat inconvenience. Worse things have happened.

Grateful for: perspective.