Superstitious Computers

I was never very superstitious until I started working with computers. Cause and effect was always good enough for me. If there is an effect there is normally a reasonably explainable cause. This should hold true with computers, and probably does, but at times it doesn't seem to.

In the best cases I will have someone come in and tell me that their computer will not do anything when they hit the power button. The first thing that enters my mind is "power supply" and often it is. No superstition there. But then the problems get a little more murky.

For instance. Almost every day I have someone bring their computer to the shop and tell me, "This computer was working fine when I turned it off last night, but when I turned it on this morning it won't boot up all the way." The implication is the computer was fine yesterday when I turned it off, so how did it break while it was off overnight? Although this does seem strange reason tells us that the computer was probably developing undetected troubles in the days leading up to the detectable problem and upon that last shutdown something broke the camel's back. I like to look really smart and be able to tell a customer exactly what happened that disabled their computer, but sometimes I have to rely on the word "something" and just accept it. Still, this kind of problem doesn't blow the mind.

Then we get to the digitally supernatural. I sold a woman a brand new external hard drive. She calls me up and complains that I sold her a used external hard drive. She knew this because it was already full of data. I visited her home, plugged in her external hard drive, and sure enough, the drive that appeared was full of data. I was confused because the I had put this external hard drive together myself with a hard drive I had pulled from a sealed static free package straight from the manufacturer. I brought the hard drive back to the shop and plugged it in to look again. This time it was completely empty like it should have been. I was a little more confused now. I went back to her home and plugged it back into her computer. The drive appeared in the "My Computer" screen and again it was full of data. At this point I am starting to hear the Twilight Zone theme music.

After much head scratching and looking around I finally discovered that when I plugged in or turned on the new external hard drive on her computer two new drive letters were showing up in her "My Computer" screen. One was for an ancient zip drive on her computer and the other was for the external hard drive. The letter for the external hard drive showed up lower down the screen where I had to scroll to see it. I had quite reasonably assumed that the drive letter that appeared up higher was for the external hard drive I had just turned on. When I clicked on the drive letter down lower I indeed found an empty external hard drive ready to receive data. We dropped data onto the external hard drive and saw it saved there. Now I was off the hook for selling her a used external hard drive.

But the question still remained as to why this other drive would appear only when I turned on the external hard drive. An even bigger question was why was this Zip drive showing up full of data wen there was no Zip disk in the drive? I double-clicked on one of the files listed and it opened! I did a search for that file and it did not show up. It was phantom data. I had to assume it was data that had been written to a zip disk long ago by someone other than the owner (she did not recognize the data files) even though she was the original owner of the computer. I can only think that they were temporary files meant to be written to a Zip disk, but never were. But who? When? How did they remain all those years. Why did they only show up when turned on the external drive? If I could make money pursuing such questions I would put in some time to get to the bottom of this. But having many more explainable problems to resolve I've just had to let this go and classify it under the "ghost in the machine." I have had many other experiences with computers that seem unexplainable. I will describe these in the future.