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You are here: MacNN Forums > News > Mac News > My Stupid Fault: don't look back in anger

My Stupid Fault: don't look back in anger
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NewsPoster
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Aug 14, 2015, 07:59 AM
 
Having used Macs since I was a kid with an SE/30, I have a fair share of "my stupid fault" type stories of brain slips, goofs, and outright naivety when it comes to dealing with computers, but one particular story stands out: not because of the disaster itself, but because of why I was under so much pressure as to make the bone-headed mistake that I did. Things were a bit different then, but the lessons I learned continue to be valuable today.

At the time, I was still courting the young lady that would soon be my wife, and things were going smoothly: her family seemed to accept me, we all got along very well, and I spent so much time at their house that I had all but moved in. However, there were some differences: they were Jewish, I was not, and they were all Windows; I was by this point all-Mac (though at the time I still knew more than enough about Windows to work with it smoothly).

Given that my future father-in-law was in the printing business, I was naturally surprised at his dependence on Windows PCs -- having spent, at that point, a number of years in print shops, advertising agencies, and service bureaus that were (of course) 98 percent Mac, with one lone Windows machine for the occasional client who had files requiring (shudder) Microsoft Publisher, or in a format that could not be read easily on the Mac in those days. Printers hated it when that happened.

The setup

I casually tried to persuade my fiance's father and the rest of the family to give Macs a try, as they were constantly calling on me to assist them in various difficulties. They listened respectfully, but gracefully declined to switch, given their business and personal investment in the machines and software. I, as the interloper in the family, opted not to press the issue much -- though I'm sure an occasional reminder would slip my lips while I again did some sort of maintenance or wrestled with some problematic update.

In an effort to be helpful and try to make a good impression on my FIL-to-be, I often offered to help out at the print shop or to do a design for something in a format readable by their older Windows equipment, and though the offers were only occasionally taken up, I was helpful, and they appreciated it.

One day, I got an urgent call from him: he had landed a big job that would be very lucrative, but the client wanted to work with a designer that used Macs. Would I take on the project? After getting the brief on what was involved, I said I would be happy to do it. I had a Mac at home, and my arsenal of Adobe and Quark products that any freelance graphic designer at the time needed. I was ready to prove not only that I was a good graphic artist, but that I -- and Macs -- could be a big boost to his business, and help him lure clients that might otherwise be reluctant to work with a Windows-centric shop in a Mac-dominated field. This would be his -- and my -- big break.

The disaster

My Mac was a few years old by that point, and I was in the cycle of upgrading it rather than replacing it, since it had been a workhorse tool for me. I had recently maxed out the RAM and installed a faster, 7200rpm hard drive at considerable expense (SSDs weren't an option back then) about a year earlier. I had noticed recently that I would get occasional slowdowns, but they would soon resolve themselves, so I didn't think much about them.

I worked on the advertising campaign for the client for about three weeks, and it went pretty smoothly. I would produce a concept from their guidelines, and print out or send them a PDF. They would then comment, changing their minds about a lot of what they said they wanted, and trying to make the design "busier" in order to cram more information in (anyone who has been a freelance designer is probably nodding their heads right now). I would revise to their specifications, diplomatically suggest that less is sometimes more, and the cycle would repeat.

Eventually, however, we got to crunch time. "Final" (I use those quotes deliberately) changes were made, and we made preparations for printing, which were much more elaborate than they are today: this job required traditional offset printing, and so needed things like registration marks, CMYK separation files, color conversions to match specific Pantone colors, the works. Being able to deliver this on the first try without fail would make a big impression on my fiance's father, enrich the family, and guarantee me the girl and perhaps a spot in the family business. I suddenly started to feel the pressure.

This was when the Power Mac decided, rather suddenly, to start doing everything really slowly. Each step -- from launching an app to opening a document -- would take minutes. I had gotten used to a pattern of short, inexplicable beachballs and pauses, but suddenly every operation was taking an excruciatingly long time -- and the deadline for delivery of the final proof PDFs and preflighted assets and layout files to the printer was fast approaching.

I had been struggling with the machine for hours, growing ever-more stressed as time flew by, and I was still finding tiny errors that needed correcting, or discovering little settings that needed tweaking to get exactly the result I wanted -- which meant another round of agonizing waiting. It had to be perfect, you see.

Finally, my patience was at an end. As the Mac beachballed yet again as the final files were being output, I lost my patience completely and performed some, um, "percussive maintenance" on the side of the Power Mac to ... coax it along. Yes, coax it along.

The moment I did it, I knew this was a terrible thing I had done, and almost instantly the machine (well actually the hard drive inside it) made a horrible noise. "No no no noooooo!" I screamed as the drive (which in hindsight had been starting to fail for a while) made further grinding sounds, and then died. I'm not sure anything short of DriveSavers could have helped me at that moment.

In my rush to get the job finished, I had not made a recent backup (please insert disapproving "tut-tut" noises here). I had the assets and an earlier version, but I would need another full day at least to recreate the final masterpiece, and now I was out a functioning Mac -- and out of time. I was going to cost my soon-to-be-former father-in-law an important job, I was going to lose out on future work, I would fail in my mission to convince them that Macs were better -- and the possibility that they would still let me marry their daughter suddenly seemed very remote.

So what happened?

After a brief period of complete breakdown, I pulled myself together enough to make an important decision: I would not make excuses. I called my fiance's dad and somewhat tearfully explained exactly what had happened and how sorry I was to have failed him. To my great good fortune (as I would be reminded many more times over the remaining years of his life), he was the kindest, nicest, and most centered person I ever knew, and never seemed to panic. He listened, he said he'd make some calls, he reassured me that my name wasn't mud with him.

The next morning he phoned, and said that while he had intended to tell the client what I had told him, they had interrupted him with a couple of "final final" changes they wanted made -- changes that would have cost us dearly to make if we had sent the job to the printer on time. They were extremely apologetic, and willing to pay extra to make up for the problems this might have caused. He listened, he said little, and finally told them only that he would see what he could do.

I told him I could finish the job still, since I had access to my old college Mac labs that also had the software I needed. I spent an entire 24-hour day putting the project back together, saving the day, and impressing everyone -- even my future father-in-law, who appreciated my candor and my relative calm in the face of a high-pressure disaster. Because I then had to replace the drive (and decided to just replace that Mac entirely -- my love affair with it was over, despite it sort of being my own stupid fault), I lost money on that job -- but that didn't matter: I got the girl.

The lessons I learned from that experience were many, but here are the ones that I want to leave you with: the first is to make routine backups, especially if you are working on important projects. We didn't have Time Machine at that time, but manual backups when you remembered to do it just didn't cut it. I became much more vigilant about backing up versions of work projects after that.

The second lesson was to pick up on warning signs. I ignored what, in hindsight, was an obvious and growing hard drive problem because it wasn't inconveniencing me too much, and I was a busy guy. You kids today with your SMARTReporter and your Disk Utility, you will often get a heads-up when a drive is starting to fail. Don't ignore it, or put it off. As crazy cheap as hard drives and external drives are today, there's no excuse not to quickly backup and replace a suspect drive.

The third lesson was, of course, that hitting things can make a problem way worse. If you've reached the point in an issue that you're ready to take an axe to the thing or throw it out the window, that's your cue to stop, walk away, calm down, have a think, and map out a plan of action (which might still involve throwing it out the window, but only after knowing what to do after that).

The fourth lesson was that when you screw up, you have to own it. Be honest, be transparent, be genuinely sorry. Sometimes that policy hurts, but more often you catch an incredibly "lucky" break because you were up-front, and contrite. It also helps to have the sweetest in-laws on the planet, though I will leave to the reader to judge whether trying to impress your fiance's father in this manner would work in your own situations.

There's a fifth lesson that might not seem as obvious, but has served me in good stead since that black day, which is this: if you rely on your computer for your business, you have a single point of failure. Even if you have an up-to-date clone drive, your computer itself could fail; your Internet could go down for a prolonged period; your house wiring could get hit by lightning; you could accidentally pour a drink on your MacBook Pro. Accidents and disasters happen, and if you can't afford to be without a computer or net access for long, have a "Plan B" or some secondary hardware that you can use temporarily until you can get back on your feet. It's really less expensive than you think.

It doesn't have to be a duplicate of your current setup, but a recent Mac, or iPad, or something you can borrow, boot from, or access your cloud copy of those important files so you can meet the deadline will do. Then, crisis averted, you can do whatever needs to be done to get back up and running without so much stress. This may sound like overkill, but if its your business on the line, it's an investment that will someday save your bacon, and possibly your sanity, when the unexpected happens.

-- Charles Martin (@Editor_MacNN)
( Last edited by NewsPoster; Aug 14, 2015 at 03:36 PM. )
     
jdonahoe
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Aug 14, 2015, 12:44 PM
 
Love the "percussive maintenance", I've used that way too many times.

Funny failure, but sad at the time, was a new Mac the department got in '84 or '85. It was the early kind that had a floppy disk startup, no hard drive. The secretary typed a student's thesis onto the Mac and not knowing how things worked, assumed everything was fine and promptly turned it off without saving. She was one of those hard core typists that never made a mistake when she typed, which was important when typing out a 100 page final thesis on paper for submission. I don't think she ever used a computer for word processing after that experience.
     
Charles Martin
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Aug 14, 2015, 02:08 PM
 
Ha! Great story, thanks for sharing that.
Charles Martin
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WalterC
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Aug 14, 2015, 05:16 PM
 
Shivers down the spine recalling digital faux-pas. Great story. Now it's dealing with dozens of backup drives, and the need for psychoanalysis re: paranoid schizophrenia.
     
coffeetime
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Aug 14, 2015, 05:56 PM
 
Interesting. That's how I learned my lesson on backup also. Lost everything due to hard drive failure (Seagate and still paranoid about it). Luckily all of my works were already submitted before it failed.
     
JackWebb
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Aug 15, 2015, 03:16 PM
 
Over 12 years ago I was upgrading an OS X Server to a new major version. I thought I had tape backups working with Retrospect and as my routine I backed the whole server up to a Firewire drive before performing the OS upgrade. Somehow the upgrade failed and in that process the firewire drive would no longer mount. I found out the tape backups were more than a month old. The Firewire drive was killed such that one of the firewire ports on the drive was dead and the drive was toast apparently because I left the drive connected through the upgrade process. Big data loss. Fortunately we were able to piece some things back from what users had locally stored. Lesson learned: 1. Make sure tape backups are actually working. 2. Don't leave firewire backup drives connected though OS updates and restarts on an XServe. 3. Keep multiple backups. I now personally have up to 7 backups including off-site and fire safe.
     
highrez
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Aug 18, 2015, 07:23 PM
 
True story. Back in the 80s I had an old 40MB Quantum SCSI hard drive attached to a Mac Plus. The drive suddenly stopped working so I called Quantum's tech support.

He told me - QUOTE - "Disconnect all the cables from the drive and then hold it up in front of you."

Me - "Ok. Done."

Tech - "Great. Now drop it."

Me - "Excuse me?!"

Tech - "Well it sounds like the bearings have seized up. The only thing you can try is to drop it - preferably on a hard surface - from about six feet off the floor. Either it will fix it or not."

Me - *THUD* - Pause to reconnect cables and boot up Mac. "Didn't work."
     
AFC1970
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Aug 19, 2015, 05:43 AM
 
Love the story which 'struck' all sorts of chords with me, mind you I've never hit a Mac but have often thumped a windows box which sometimes oddly enough have responded!
Adding to the back-up thread an often overlooked point is to make sure the backups work. I religiously backed up our accounts on a daily basis using a 6 disc revolving system. Then on the 365th day of the financial year the hard drive on our Apricot (yes I'm that old) failed. It was only then I discovered I'd been backing up garbage for the whole year. I responded in a mature fashion and went down the pub. Scarred for life....
     
Spheric Harlot
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Aug 19, 2015, 06:10 AM
 
Originally Posted by highrez View Post
True story. Back in the 80s I had an old 40MB Quantum SCSI hard drive attached to a Mac Plus. The drive suddenly stopped working so I called Quantum's tech support.

He told me - QUOTE - "Disconnect all the cables from the drive and then hold it up in front of you."

Me - "Ok. Done."

Tech - "Great. Now drop it."

Me - "Excuse me?!"

Tech - "Well it sounds like the bearings have seized up. The only thing you can try is to drop it - preferably on a hard surface - from about six feet off the floor. Either it will fix it or not."

Me - *THUD* - Pause to reconnect cables and boot up Mac. "Didn't work."
Back in the 80s, a schoolmate's parents had ordered an Apple IIgs from the US that broke on shipping. Apple support suggested turning it upside down for a day.

It worked.


And then, there is the Apple ///, where lifting it six inches up of the desk and dropping it hard was actually an officially endorsed support solution:
When Apple III Customers Were Told to Drop Their Computers
     
   
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