A system arrived here yesterday with a failed DVD/CD-RW combo drive - door refused to open.
As this was one of mine from a few years ago I said to the owner that I was disappointed that it had only lasted for (checking the serial number) 3 and a bit years before failing. He said nothing - I suspect because he saw this as a precurser to being told there was no warranty on it. Sharp operator that one! Anyway, as usual he denied any knowledge of the reason for the failure and muttered something about it being hardly ever used and then only for playing light music. I nodded wisely and did the usual IT engineer eyeball rolling exercise.
I plugged it all in and true enough the drive door refused to budge. Following standard procedure No 1 I inserted the special probe into the special probe orifice and pushed. Nothing. Pushed harder - still nothing, not even a bit of mechancal whirring to indicate the thing was at least making an effort.
Looking at the front of the thing I noticed some small scratches around one corner of the panel on the front of the caddy tray - looking a bit closer this looked like marks on a transparent plastic - nope, it is on a thin clear very hard film. Grasping the trusty craft knife I cut round the edge of the door and Lo! it sort of moved. I tried the special probe and the door opened! Wowsers - what a gadget. Still, the thing refused to open and close without help so I decided to fit a new drive - some tut tut tutting from the client but he was witness to all this and could hardly complain.
It took two strong men and a lot of bad language to get that drive out of the system case - that clear hard film was all over the front of the drive and the pastic front panel of the case.
Any idea what it was?
Apparently, and this was a grudging admission of 'well might have been', his son had upseit his daugter and she by way of revenge had superglued the door shut. And herself to the machine - the scratch marks were Mum's very careful peeling of child's finger off front of PC.
And a final kick in the nethers from that child - she said she had glued the boy's favourite CD in there - it was empty so now she has to remember where she really hid it or that comes out of her pocketmoney too.
Moral - Client who says nothing is probably as guilty as sin!

And a good time was had by all... You know if he was just honest in the first place all it would have cost him was your time to install a new drive, plus the drive, but no, he went ahead and had you guessing, et. al.

If it was me that girl's pocketmoney would have dried up until the bill for this one got paid.

Part of the golden rule, for sure. There are a variety of levels of discomfort.
We put full disclosure into the repair agreement.
Then there are the ones that requested we drill a hole in the hard drive, then had the IRS visit to try to get it back.

Rather than knacker a perfectly good drill, I usually chuck them out of the upstairs window onto concrete - that's pretty terminal too!

LOL. Nice story.

Not so much a story as it is true - only the names of the players have been omitted!

Can't help but think about the antics of the American Pie cast whilst reading that story.... Stupidity prevails once more...

Spyder_1386

Well that turned out to be a complete network non event! I failed to tell y'all that these two machines are quite close to one another and the problem turned out to be because two wireless keyboards were inerfering with one another. It did not take long to find out once I had decided that neithyer of the machines were recording any faults or errors at all.
Another happy customer!

Thanks for the update. We service a lot of offices, where that is a likely problem.