What is your most hated chore?

[milestogo]

21. I re-imaged a machine that belonged to an engineer.

I had told him to back up his work. I told him I was going to re-image his computer, but he didn't understand what re-imaging was. He always saved to the hard drive because he said it "took to long" to save to the network. We're talking about a few seconds.

So he had no work to show for the last six weeks. He was designing an engine and it was gone. Pretty soon the department head was in my face telling me that they were on a deadline and we had to get it back. "Cmon, we all watch CSI. We know there are ways."

So I started searching and I found a company that could do recovery at the "sector" level, as long as it hadn't been written over. Amazingly we were able to do this over the internet. The diagram was 98% recovered. It wasn't cheap, but the engineering department paid.

Not a technical failure- a communication failure. Engineers are damn smart but they don't necessarily understand IT lingo.