Should I disappear . . .

online, don’t necessarily think the worst.  I’ve only got a hard drive that hasn’t failed . . . YET.

Norton Disk Doctor bleeped day before yesterday to warn me “hey, the SMART monitoring function on your hard disk says you’re accumulating more errors than you should; you might wanna checkitout.”  Good ol’ Peter Norton, he was right.  I ran the onboard hard drive diagnostic and it flunked, as big as life.  An hour in “chat” with a tech in the consumer-group support queue in Hyderabad got a case set up and a repair dispatch created—the wrong way.  She set it up as an onsite service call and utterly ignored my instructions to send me a Seagate drive as replacement, that I wouldn’t have another Western Digital like the one I have now, which failed after only eleven months in service.  She dispatched it with a Western Digital drive anyhow, and the hell with me.  (I wonder what she thought she was about, as the address I gave her was for my cube at the Empire, and I would just LOVE to see a service provider’s onsite technician try to get into our building!)  Messes like that are why corporate customers pay extra to get support from my queue.  Sweartogods, if I could have done so without causing a commotion I would have just set up my own part dispatch in the first place.

I came in the morning to find the onsite call mess as well as a second parts-only dispatch sending me installation media I’d told the Hyderabadi tech I already had and didn’t need.  I cancelled both dispatches and asked an L1 on our floor to do it over properly for me for a favor; he did, and twenty minutes later I had the single parts-only dispatch I’d wanted to begin with, and with exactly the drive I wanted as well.  (It’s very nice to have a “do not substitute” flag available that can keep you from getting parts you wouldn’t have on a bet.)

I just checked on the shipment.  It has a tracking number assigned from DHL, which means it ought to ship tonight and be here tomorrow, but at the latest it should arrive Friday.  I think the old drive will hold out that long; it hasn’t done any really ugly hardware-failure tricks yet, and once I have it I think I can use Ghost to mirror the old drive’s applications and data onto the new one, which would save me several days of reinstalling and configuration.

A pukka sahib ordered the immediate re-institution of the Raj.  Fnord.