Those may well be the two sweetest words in Technical Support. Under Warranty. Anything that fails under warranty can conveniently be sent out for repair in exchange for a loaner service unit so you get minimal downtime. Some companies don’t even bother to repair a failed unit, they just ship you a new one. American Power Corporation (APC) does that with their UPS products, and Iomega with their storage solutions. Some systems even come with a lifetime warranty, like the HP networking switches. Bust one port on an HP 8- 24- or 48-port switch and they ship you a whole new unit, even if your unit is 5 years old.

One of my best experiences about warranty is the IBM Thinkpad’s 3-year warranty. Our office issue Thinkpads have in their third year of warrantly had suffered one minor form of failure: The R40’s display would every now and then become garbled, The T40’s LCD cover when moved would cause the display to disappear, and my T42’s fan just quit. In all cases, our supplier Technopaq had taken in the laptops and arranged for a new system board for each. I still have two more years to go on the warranty on the T42, but both the R40 and the T40 were on their final months of warranty. Getting a new board for them is almost like getting a new machine.

So my T42 (well, technically not MINE but the company’s, but no one else gets to use it but me, so there) is in the shop. It’s been there since Thursday. They have the system board on stock so I should be seeing it again middle of next week after tests and all, almost as good as new.

Which means, I have an excuse NOT to work this weekend.

He he he.

I once gave a mini-lecture to an office-full of computer newbies about the benefits of saving their work, telling them of the various yet quite simple ways of preventing the primeval scream that may be heard from a user whose work has disappeared because his computer has crashed. I enumerated everything from “clicking on the diskette icon on the menu bar” to hitting Ctrl+S on one’s keyboard every time your fingers become idle after typing, including not to turn your fiber cable into a doorstop, and capped it off with this well-known I.T. joke:

Jesus and Satan have a discussion as to who is the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they come to an agreement to hold a contest, with God as the judge.

They sit themselves at their computers and begin. They type furiously, lines of code streaming up the screen, for several hours straight. Seconds before the end of the competition, a bolt of lightning strikes, taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over.

He asks Satan to show what he has come up with. Satan is visibly upset, and cries, “I have nothing. I lost it all when the power went out.”

“Very well, then,” says God, “let us see if Jesus fared any better.”

Jesus enters a command, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers. Satan is astonished.

He stutters, “B-b-but how? I lost everything, yet Jesus’ program is intact. How did he do it?”

God smiled all-knowingly, “Jesus saves.”

Things could be worse. We’ve had our share of computer mishaps from Coke on the keyboard to mice in the minitower. But this list from Ontrack.com tops all lists that I’ve seen so far.

The Ontrack 2005 Top Ten List of Data Disasters and Remarkable Recoveries

10. PhD Almost an F : A PhD candidate lost his entire dissertation when a bad power supply suddenly zapped his computer and damaged the USB Flash drive that stored the document. Had the data not been recovered, the student would not have graduated.

9. Suffering from Art : While rearranging her home office, a woman accidentally dropped a five pound piece of clay pottery on her laptop, directly onto the hard drive area that contained a book she’d been working on for five years and 150 year-old genealogy pictures that had not yet been printed.

8. Domestic Dilemma : A husband deleted all of his child’s baby pictures when he accidentally hit the wrong button on his computer. His wife hinted at divorce if he did not get the pictures back.

7. Bite Worse than Bark: A customer left his memory stick lying out and his dog mistook it for a chew toy. Ontrack was able to recover all of the data despite teeth marks all over the stick and a hole that went completely through.

6. Don’t Try this at Home: A man attempting to recover data from his computer on his own found the job too challenging mid-way through and ended up sending Ontrack his completely disassembled drive with each of its parts in a separate baggie.

5. Out of Time: A clockmaker suffered a system meltdown, losing the digital designs for all of its clocks. Ontrack literally beat the clock recovering all their data just in time for an important international tradeshow.

4. Drilling for Data: During a multi-drive RAID recovery, engineers discovered one drive belonging in the set was missing. The customer found the missing drive in a dumpster, but in compliance with company policy for disposing of old drives, it had a hole drilled through it.

3. Safe at Home: After one of their executives experienced a laptop crash, the Minnesota Twins professional baseball team called on Ontrack to rescue crucial scouting information about their latest prospects. The team now relies on Ontrack for all data recoveries within its scouting and coaching ranks.

2. Hardware Problems: A frustrated writer attacked her computer with a hammer. When the engineers received the computer, the hammer imprint was clearly visible on the top cover.

And finally, the number one most bizarre data disaster of 2005:

1. La Cucaracha: In hopes of rescuing valuable company information, a customer pulled an old laptop out of a warehouse where it had been sitting unused for 10 years. When engineers opened the computer, it contained hundreds of husks of dead and decaying cockroaches.

One late morning at work I found myself with a landline handset wedged between my shoulder and the right side of my head, my left hand holding my mobile to my left ear, my right hand picking words off my keyboard as I logged the conversation I was having with the person on the other end of the landline, and repeating everything that person said to the other person on my mobile, who was one of the technical support engineers on my team.

If you can picture that, stop. I tried to imagine what I looked like and I realized “pathetic” was the best word to describe it.

On top of that I do web design and project management for the same company that I run the tech support team. Once our HR/Admin head came downstairs and stood beside me watching what I was doing on my computer, and I gave her a rundown of what I was doing (more specifically what was keeping me from doing what I was supposed to be doing) and she asked me

“Are you talking to me as Tech Support Manager, Web Developer or PM?”

“You’re not paying me enough,” I laughed.

One of the things I do to unwind is fiddle around with Google Earth, which is quite useful for some of the work I do (classified), and the places I send my tech engineers off to (also classified). I’m just getting the feel of entering gps coordiates and downloading overlays (I have a very good one of Area 51 which I downloaded from one of the gps forums I visit), and it’s all so cool if you have a good internet connection and an above-average video card.

The other thing I’ve started to do is plant flowers. Well I did the first step today, I planted the seeds.

The attendant at the plant shop said I should be seeing shoots in three days, if I did everything right. Not too much water, 50-50 sunlight. Maybe light conversation, nothing ponderous or political.

Hmm, sounds like me.