Enemies at the Seagate


After 3 long years of faithful service, holding countless gigs of movies that of course were all legal, my external hard drive has passed away. Much like a human 3 year old, these things die when you shake them around too much. I must have taken it for granted and jostled it a bit too much, leaving me in the comically desperate situation that follows. What you see above, is a frozen hard drive, sitting on a block of cheddar (also frozen). Peeling apart the external casing in an attempt to get to the creamy insides proved to be a lot more difficult than I had anticipated.

Oftentimes when I work on computers, I follow a series of steps, and the first step is always “drink lots of booze”. This practice started by accident, when I was once building a computer and my brain thought “hey, what if we drank a lot of Mike’s Hard Lemonade?!”. I, being underage and loving that abominable drink went ahead and probably drank 2 bottles before being completely smashed. I sliced up my index finger trying to push out a piece of sheet metal and exclaimed “I won’t be doing this again”.
The next time I did it I cut the same index finger at a different angle. I was much more drunk, so was simply puzzled at how warm, tingly, and wet my finger had become, and was much more puzzled as to how to stop my 99.6% blood/.4% alcohol ratio from pouring out of me onto the carpet. I swore off doing that again.
The third time I did it, my pinky got the brunt of the damage. Much like Pavlov’s dog, I have stopped drinking after deciding to repair a computer, but rather think about computer repair and get incredibly thirsty. I mean, my mouth is a goddam Sahara just typing this.
Opening up the external hard drive was fraught with injuries, just like past ventures into the world of computer repair. Even though I’ve finished this time without bleeding, I have a massive bruise on the palm of my hand from gripping the pliers so hard. The instructions online recommended using rigid wires to depress some internal tabs to make one side pop right off. The side didn’t even come close to “popping off”, and I had to attack the thing like depression era hobo opening a can of beans. The side eventually came undone, but it literally took the entire viewing of The Road before I got the hard drive out of it’s tomb.

On the advice of the internet, the same people that brought you such helpful tips as “Making Meth” and “Obama Was Born in Kenya”, I decided to throw the drive in the freezer to “expand the metal to stop the drive head for hitting the wrong part”. Whatever. I knew that it was only slightly better than smashing it with a rock, which I just did before writing this blog entry.
Some of the lengths that we go through to repair computers are extraordinary. Today I went through 6 hours of nonsense to get a hard drive working, and previous times I had gone through an entire bottle of Monarch Rum mixed with Diet Coke. Ultimately, the only things I’ve learned are that I need to back up my important things, and continue buying Western Digital. I’m still going to get blotto before I start fucking with electronics.

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