This tree saw the clouds part – but that was yesterday.
More and more frequently, Art asks me for help with his computer problems. This is very hard for me. Art is and always has been a loyal Apple customer – his computers are all, always, only MacBooks. I hate Apple systems and OS design with a passion, and it’s always been challenging for me to even accept that he sees it differently. But even getting past that, I have to deal with the fact I really don’t know much about how they’re supposed to work. Add to that the fact that Arthur has his own idiosyncratic ways he thinks things should be done, and I really simply can never, ever please him at all.
Case in point: the other day he received in the mail from Amazon two large SSD external drives he’d ordered. He has a huge stockpile of saved stuff on his computers and hard drives, and he needed more storage (though arguably this is mostly because he doesn’t remember how to “clean house” on his computers anymore). Well he got these hard drives and couldn’t get either of them to work. I took a look at them. They were clearly labeled “for Windows.” Now it’s true that often these type of external drives are cross-functional, but I wondered how he’d managed to order them. You can’t really assume they’re cross-functional.
I told him I’d take a look at them on my computers. First I tried on my Linux machines, but no luck. So I booted up my rarely-used Windows partition, and pretty soon I had both of them working. I had to create partition tables – apparently they shipped without them, but expected Windows to attach to them and create the partition tables, or something like that. Once that was done, I could create partitions on each one and format them. I took them back downstairs and Arthur plugged them into his MacBook and sure enough, they were read fine, now.
Rather than thank me, Arthur complained that they drives weren’t displaying the way that he was used to, in his Mac OS finder tool. He considered this unacceptable – but it’s just a different display – the drives are not functionally different. I suspect they display differently because they’re still Windows formatted (NTFS), rather than generic (FAT32) or Mac format.
Why do I bother?
[daily log: walking, 5km; dogwalking, 3km]