Most of the material things that change our lives aren’t exactly sneaky about it. You know, as you’re putting on that wedding ring for the first time, that your life is never going to be the same. Some things surprise you, though.
Tonight, I plugged in and tested a hard drive. I’ve done that many times before, but this particular hard drive was different. Almost nineteen years ago, I plugged this same hard drive in for the first time and ran my first test on a hard drive.
It failed. You see, nineteen years ago I had no idea what I was doing with computers. I didn’t even know you could get a bigger hard drive until my freshman year roommate* told me about it and showed me a catalog of computer parts. They had all kinds of crazy stuff, even something I’d never heard of: a one gigabyte “solid state drive.” (It was something like $1000, but I had a feeling it would be a big deal if the price ever came down and they improved the storage density.)
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*Who introduced himself to me by telling me he was a sociopath and who was eternally annoyed that he couldn’t see my aura. He’s the kind of person who would be terrible fictional character because nobody would find him believable. Heck, you probably had a hard time with the first sentence of this paragraph, and that only covers the first two conversations I ever had with him. I’ve got a year’s worth of this stuff, people.
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So I purchased my first aftermarket computer part: a ten gigabyte Western Digital hard drive. It arrived a little after Christmas and I plugged it in right away, eager to increase my storage space by a factor of 2.5. Actually, I should say that I tried to plug it in, because it turns out I should have checked to see if it fit in my case. It didn’t, so I did what seemed like the logical thing to do and duct-taped it to the side of the CD drive.
Surprisingly, it didn’t work when I turned on the computer. Even more surprisingly, it wasn’t because it got vibrationally damaged by not being screwed in, but only because I didn’t know you needed to format it.
Thus began several months of failed attempts to make effective use of the thing, but by June or so I finally had it set up as my primary hard drive. In the process, I made pretty much every mistake in the book (I wish I had a recording of the computer technician with whom I was speaking when I told him that I’d duct-taped it to the computer…I think I broke him).
Over the years, as I migrated from computer to computer, I kept that drive as a secondary. Eventually computers no longer took IDE hard drives, though, and 10gb went from an insane amount of space to nothing at all, so in 2004 I unplugged that hard drive for the last time. I kept it, of course. That stupid, amazing little thing turned me from someone who knew nothing about computers into someone who could swap out a motherboard. Years later, those technical skills played a big part in a big promotion to a job that didn’t exist when I purchased that hard drive.
Tens of thousands of people probably bought that hard drive, but I’m probably the only one who got a legal job because of it. It makes me wonder: how many things have I purchased that are completely unremarkable to me (a tie, perhaps, or a cable modem) changed the life of someone else who bought it?
What about you? Are there any perfectly ordinary goods you’ve acquired that had an unexpected effect on your life?
Oh, and the test came back flawless, by the way. That little thing is still in great shape.