I have the “Make Noel take apart electronics when he doesn’t have to” skills
Posted By Sika on July 29, 2009
I’m not sure how this will translate in real life, but it’s really rather impressive, especially considering all I do to not activate these skills.
My external hard drive stopped functioning. This is not the tragedy it may have appeared to be as I was nearly done with The Wire. Also the cease of functioning was intermittent at first and initially remedied by squishing the USB connection and/or smacking the hard drive around a bit. So I had time to prepare. Emotionally, I mean.
I did some diagnostics. I plugged a flash drive into both of the USB ports on my computer, and they worked fine. I plugged the USB cable into my camera and downloaded my pictures, so it obviously wasn’t that. I tried to open the external hard drive case with a butter knife to determine if a connection had somehow been smacked loose at some point. But there was a splintering of plastic that made me wonder exactly how wise that plan was.
So, I went to Noel, who I trust to be more up to date on the whole skillset of cracking cases of electronical items.
Now, I need to preface what I am about to tell you with a flashback. Just so you can properly understand how much of a right Noel has to hate me right now.
When my previously beloved Vaio (oh, how naive I was) had the near-fatal flaw of a cracked screen, I took it to Noel, so we could attempt to rescue the hard drive to put into another computer which I could then use. We opened the back. Where I had always thought was the hard drive was a vent or something. The other panels revealed many things that were unrelated to hard drives.
So Noel decided to go through the keyboard. He got it part way off, and then discovered he needed to remove the back further to get to the screw that he needed to remove to get the keyboard off to get to the hard drive.
After all that, the hard drive didn’t fit. Noel offered to help convert it to an external hard drive, but I had already backed everything important onto mine. So, Noel put it all back together. All told, over an hour of work, to achieve absolutely nothing.
So now, this past weekend, Noel took apart my external hard drive, then took apart one of his, then swapped out the connector things. It worked, my connector thing with his hard drive. I became concerned.
But then my hard drive also worked, with my original connector thing. This after I swore up and down that it obviously wasn’t the USB cord, because I had tested the thing.
It was the USB cord. If we had tested that first, Noel wouldn’t have spent half an hour taking things apart and putting them back together.You know, kind of like how if we had discussed alternate plans if the hard drive didn’t fit in the other computer, he probably wouldn’t have spent that hour uselessly either.
So I bought him lunch, in the hopes he wouldn’t hate me forever. We’ll see how that goes.
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