Many years ago
I owned a computer store in the pre-IBM-PC era. I sold a very expensive full-up system to a customer. 8" dual floppies, 64 k of RAM, multiple programming languages, zippy Z-80 processor - the whole works. Upgradeable to hard disk if you were independently wealthy.
A few days after buying it, the guy comes in and says it won't boot. Sure enough, the boot floppy is horribly corrupted. I burn him a few more boot floppies and send him home.
Next week he's back. Same problem and he now has 4 different corrupted boot floppies. CP/M is crying out for help.
He leaves the computer. I try for a week to make it fail. I do lots of compiles. I run diagnostics (it was a really good computer, there actually was a disk full of diagnostics). Runs like a champ.
I finally decide he MUST be doing something horrible to the floppies. When he comes back in I start questioning him about how he stores them, and he tells me "It can't be anything I am doing. I was afraid the computer might damage the disks if I leave them in so every night I take them out and stick them to my filing cabinet with a big magnet I took out of a loudspeaker".
First I pick my jaw up off the floor. Then I try (not totally successfully) to suppress laughter. He was a good customer otherwise. Then I spent a week or so suppressing anger over how much time I spent trying to diagnose his "hardware problem".
Retail is hard.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
