Stuart the IT Cat
Stuart somehow reformatted Spooky Man’s shiny-new-laptop solid-state hard drive RAID on Tuesday. He (Spooky Man, not Stuart) had downloaded a rather large file and wanted to copy it onto a flash drive. Stepping into another room for a moment, he returned to find him (Stuart, not Spooky Man) standing on the keyboard, trying to remove the flash drive (bad kitty! you have to unmount it first!).
Upon rebooting, the computer couldn’t find Windows. Spooky man spent most of Wednesday reinstalling and reconfiguring the computer. But even after all that, it still wasn’t right. The third drive was missing, somehow — I say “somehow” because when I asked “so what’s wrong with it?” he made a face, then mumbled something along the lines of “Damned cat, I should have skinned him.”
So this morning, on the way home from the last doctor appointment for the month, we stopped at Best Buy and he asked a Geek Squad person for a second opinion.
The drives are all fine. They’re just uncoupled, and the third one, which I understand is some kind of hybrid hard drive that is half-solid state and half-normal, is empty. Somehow, Stuart managed to reformat that hard drive, says Spooky Man.
I say, he’s quite an intelligent cat — by nine months of age, he had figured out how to open drawers and understood that the doorknob opens a door — but I don’t think he’s quite that intelligent. Perhaps Spooky Man did something (or failed to do some other thing) while reinstalling Windows yesterday that changed his RAID from all three drives to only the fully solid-state drives and reformatted the hybrid. I didn’t say that in the store, because then he would have looked stupid in front of a Geek Squad Geek. Because of a cat. And he’s an A+ certified nerd (Spooky Man, not Stuart).
Not acceptable.
However, the final answer is that the computer is fine, the cat is fine, the hard drive is fine, and Spooky Man didn’t look stupid in front of the Geek Squad. They didn’t even charge us for looking at it.
Acceptable.
At some point, Spooky Man will have to accept that a highly intelligent cat is far more dangerous than a normal cat and treat Stuart accordingly. You cannot stick something interesting and different looking into the edge of the thing that you put on your lap (instead of a cat, the horror) and not expect him to investigate as soon as you’re not looking.
Well, you can, but you might end up looking stupid in front of a Geek.
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