The virtues of sloppiness

With a German mother, there was never a chance I’d evolve into a conscientiously neat person. Her iron-willed attention to detail simply dwarfed mine, so I wound up going the other way and fully embracing the slob lifestyle. But occasionally this behavior has its virtues, as evidenced in my latest visit to that seething fleshpot known as Honolulu.

In the midst of testing wireless gateway switches (some surprises there, by the way), I had to shift my world from an old IBM ThinkPad T40p long-term loaner to a new and tragically sexy ThinkPad T41. Not a big headache, but one really should wipe the old ThinkPad before sending it back.

This I didn’t do, however, as I’m sure many corporate employees don’t do when returning notebooks to the IT pool, because we know they’re just going to be re-imaged and sent off to the refurb bin. So we just make them look wiped; all I did was grab my data files and a few of the basic settings I enjoy and then uninstalled the various applications I’d installed on the box, such as Microsoft Office.

So a relatively clean T40p notebook was sitting on the desk waiting for shipment back to Big Blue Land the following morning. The new, fully loaded T41 went with me on my way to the hotel. But first we had to stop at a local technology conference to further the cause of geekdom — at which time, prior to dinner, I had placed the notebook bag into the trunk of the rental car, just below the sticker that said “Don’t leave valuables in the trunk.” Two hours later I was the latest victim in Honolulu’s ongoing wave of property theft, which has a variety of causes according to the locals, including anything from a “crack epidemic” to “those damn kids.”

And did Mr. All-Star-IT do a backup of all his data after moving it from one PC to the next? Hell no; that’s something my mom would have done. So there I am — new notebook gone, big chunks of personal data floating around in the ether — discussing my options with Hawaiian police and security personnel, whose average level of interest ranks somewhere between bored and coma. Magnum, PI  is a fictional character.

It was depressing morning indeed when I returned to the lab and powered on the old T40p. I subsequently reinstalled Office and found that being a slob has benefits. For example, uninstalling Office without digging into Program Files to delete all my old mailbox information meant that simply re-installing Office brought back my entire inbox, calendar, and all my contacts. With Yahoo, it was even better. I’m such a slob that I don’t clean up my Sent folder. Ever. So I managed to get back every document created on the T40p that I e-mailed to someone — and that’s most of them. Backup by pigsty; it’s a new paradigm.

This wouldn’t have worked if I was more conscientious about returning fully wiped equipment. Nor would it have worked if Microsoft was more conscientious about wiping application data during an uninstall. If a quick-and-dirty dialog had popped up asking me if I wanted my data files deleted, I’d have checked “Yes.”

The moral of my foggy pilfer-in-paradise fable may be vague, but it’s got something to do with there being more ways than one to recover lost data. Taking that moral to heart, my fellow consultants and I decided that there is more than one way to recover lost computing hardware.

Right now, we are in the midst of forming an online citizens’ crime-watch group. They do it for your streets, so we figured why not try it for cyberspace? The details are still hazy, but the idea is to track stolen equipment based on a number of data points with the resulting information being provided to police. If any of you readers have had similar ideas and are tired of writing me death-threat e-mails, drop me a line with comments and we’ll see what and whom we can incorporate.

Magnum, I know you’re out there. Now grab T.C. and find my notebook.