Office Adventure: Hard Drive Shuffle

It's fashionable to complain about the IT department at the Day Job, but sometimes we get pretty good service. I had occasion to contact them today for two unrelated problems. The first, an issue with a Lotus Notes upgrade, was quickly resolved over the phone. The other problem involved hardware, and I'm well on the way to a resolution, with one minor snag.

While rebooting to pick up part of the Notes fix, I noticed something strange on my BIOS screen. I have two hard drives in my workstation, RAID-1ed together. The BIOS displayed one drive as green, and one red. Red is bad. I mentioned this to the Notes Fixer. Half an hour later I was contacted by a different IT guy. He wanted to come by and take the bad drive so he could order another one. "Sure!" said I.

IT Guy rebooted my machine again so he could see which drive was faulty. Then powered it down, popped open the case, extracted the hard drive and blew on it, releasing a cloud of toxic dust right above my tea. All this in less time than it takes to type it. He popped closed the case, and off he went.

I started booting. I also powered up my computer. The computer beeped funny as it started up. I checked out the BIOS screen. One red drive.

No green drive.

"He took the wrong one!" I said, and hared off after him.

There I was, running through the halls, wearing one boot and one sock. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

"IT Guy," I called, as he hove into view. You see, I wanted to make sure I got him before he put the drive under the Big Magnet. Also, I didn't know where he sits.

I explained the problem.

B: You took the wrong drive. I'd like that one back.
ITG: Oh! Right. Thanks for coming after me.
B: No problem. Of course, it wasn't for your benefit.

We walked back to my cubicle, where he swapped drives and all was well. Then he left, with a cheerful, "We should have the new drive by tomorrow morning. Hey, where's your shoe?"