frack

while i have the utmost respect and empathy for people who work in customer service and call centers, i must say this has been one of the most frustrating afternoons i've had in a long time. i spent just over two hours today on the phone with people at newegg, western digital, and ontrack trying to figure out just wtf is wrong with my new hard drive. ok, it's not that new, i've had it since christmas, and it's had its share of transfers so far . . . probably upwards of 800 GBs of movies, shows, music, and whatnot. at the end of almost every single one of these phone calls, right before they transferred me to someone else, something to the effect of "wow, that's wierd" "i've never even heard of this before" or "you must have done something wrong" was uttered by these so called customer service professionals. granted, i for some reason have the talent of coming up with computer problems that gill bates himself couldn't fix, but please dont try to make a joke about the 700+ gigs of entertainment that your drive miraculously lost and you have no utterly idea as to where it might have gone.

this brings me to the outrageous internet robbery that is data recovery. i was on the phone with bill at ontrack, who was quite polite, and spoke very good english, something i would normally consider a moot point except for the fact that my tally for the day was now 1/4. bill very plainly explained what might be wrong, the procedures that would take place, all the logistics of shipping and packaging, where they were located, where he lived, how long it would take to get it back to me, that they would run free diagnostics, his wife's name, you know, all the pertinent information for a data recovery case. then after all this, he dropped a number on me that hit like hiroshima. "with a drive your size and the fact that i haven't an idea of what might be wrong with it, i'm gonna put you in the $1500 - $2000 range" . . . i think i just pooped my pants a little bit.

now i'd always been told the importance of backing up your documents, which is why i bought my first external drive. so now that i'm on my third external drive and all i've lost are 700 gigs of movies music and tv shows, i suppose it's not the ugliest puppy in the litter, but i'm still a bit burnt on the fact that a glorified geek squad wants to charge me $2000 dollars to run a diagnostic program and perhaps do some spring cleaning on my hard drive in a dust-proof room looking like dustin hoffman in outbreak . . . or sphere. so i had to say to bill what i have been telling netflix, gamefly, and christie's cabaret, "i'm poor and i can't afford your services . . . no, not even on your finance plan".

so i've decided to drink a redbull or seven, have a few hotpockets at the ready, and begin re-downloading all my ghosted data. this means that apparently comcast and i will enter another 4 month battle as they throttle my bandwidth and i repeatedly call them telling them they are throttling me. of course this doesn't really get anybody anywhere considering they're normal response is "uhh everything looks fine on our end sir, perhaps your firewall settings are inhibiting proper port flow through you're router and/or modem" which i'm pretty sure is written down somewhere on a big poster at comcast because not only does that phrase come up a lot, it comes up from different people, in different counties, and most of them don't seem to know what half those words mean.

so here i sit, making a que of all the 400+ movies, 30+ concerts, 20+ install files, 15 audiobooks, and 70 seasons of shows that have been lost somewhere between two very tiny spinning disks of aluminum alloy.