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If you haven’t heard, Ms. Ducktoes will have to break the news to you.  Sit down and get out your hankies.  It’s a sad story. In Thailand there’s a flood and, sinking like metallic stones in the floodwaters, are oodles of hard drives.   Thailand, it turns out, produces many of the world’s hard drives.

The bad news is for us, for computer repair shops and their clients that is, that as the muddy waters submerge thousands upon thousands of hard drives and their manufacturers, hard drive prices are soaring to dizzying heights. And, as troublesome as these flimsy rectangular cases of spinning metal platters are to us, and as often as they go bad and lose all our data, documents, music, and precious photos because we have failed to back them up, we are dependent on them. We have hard drive habits.  You many not realize it, but we are all hard drive junkies.  They have our life on them, and we go through withdrawal when we lose them. (The first step is admitting you have a problem, my little duckies.) And hard drives are notoriously bad, awful really, for going bad and needing to be replaced.

And as onerous as it is for Ms. Ducktoes to drive east on 16th Avenue NE in rush hour or a snowstorm, trying not to answer her cellphone all the while, to the parts store, now when she arrives, they will only sell her TWO AT A TIME. Even if she goes back to the car and puts on a wig and trench coat and returns to the counter, they refuse to sell her more.

“Weren’t you just in here?” the guy says. “Aren’t you Ducktoes?”

“No, I’ve never been in here in my life,” I say.  “By the way, I need to pick up a couple of hard drives.”

“I just sold you two.”

“That must have been my identical twin sister.”

“It’s been nice seeing you.  Twice.”  He thinks he’s so funny.

It’s enough to make a grown woman cry.  Crying doesn’t work either on the parts store staff, by the way.

So now when your flimsy hard drive goes bad, my fine feathered friends, you’ll have to pay through the beak, so to speak, or should I say bill?  Aren’t you glad you have your hankies out?  I told you it was a sad story.

And as I say a thousand times a day, mostly to myself  as I careen down 16th Avenue NE, only answering my cellphone at red lights, don’t fail to backup your stuff.

Here is my computer repair Calgary shop.