This was posted to Resnet-L yesterday (went through today) by Adam Ward. List archives are closed, so you can subscribe to see the thread/full attribution, but here's the funniest story in the thread so far.
Just be careful who is around when talking about Freezing drives. I had an interesting call towards the end of last year. A young lady had her hard drive go bad. Her boyfriend overheard a few of the CompSci students talking about freezing drives to recover data. Well, he decided to freeze her's to give it a try.
Her boyfriend called and left me the following voicemail.
I put the drive in the chest freezer over the weekend. When I went to get it, it was cold, so I put it some cold water to defrost it. Well, it was still cold about 10 minutes later, and she really needed her paper, so I decided to use the microwave to defrost it. I don't think that worked. How is someone supposed to defrost a frozen drive? Should I put it in the oven? Oh yeah, any reason why this would cause my microwave to stop working?
I wish I was only joking about the above, but I tell that story every year to the student workers, to remind them to be careful of what they say around non-techie students, especially when they are on the job!
Another good one came a few posts later from the same author:
"On of the Student Techs kept a running list of some of the crazy things he had encountered working on student machines. I think my favorite was when one young education major put his thesis floppy disk and a CD into the dorm microwave to "burn the floppy onto the CD". Normally, I would have called the BS flag when he told me, but he held up a picture from the front page of the school paper. Main story was a CD in the kitchen set off smoke alarms."
Yea, I sorta wonder how much he's stretching it (note "end of last year" vs "tell...every year"), but good stories in any case.
Copyright ©2000-2008 Jeremy Mooney (jeremy-at-qux-dot-net)
That's freaking awesome :)