I am a big fan of Western Digital external hard drives; 1TB for £120 is a bargain especially when I am converting our home movies and every hour of DV is 14GB.

On the weekend one of my drives was acting funny, I moved it from one computer to another and it would not recognize. After futzing around with it and testing it on multiple computers I finally called tech support with the following results …

I called into European tech support and listened to a polite Dutch lady letting me know ‘that they are sorry about ze delay, ve will be with you in a moment’. After a short time, a French bloke picks up ….

FB (French Bloke):  ‘Hello, how may I help?’

ME: ‘ I have a WD My Book Pro II and Vista will not recognize it. Using both FireWire and USB. I have tested it on 3 different computers, I don’t think the USB or FireWire is sending out a signal’

FB: ‘Well, zen it is broken. Send it in’

ME: ‘Pardon?’

FB: ‘Send it in. It must be broken’

ME: ‘Uh, don’t you want to trouble shoot it or something?’

FB: ‘Well, vee could do zat wasting about 30 minutes of our time at vich point ve vould both recognize zat it is broken and you would send it in. You plug zees things in and they either vork or don’t. So it must be broken, send it in’

ME: (I start to laugh) ‘Well, don’t you want me to try pressing the reset button at least? Or something? It isn’t a hard drive, it is a chassis with dual drives and I assume some form of electronics board in there as it supports RAID so at least it should recognize it via USB. Plus, the blue power light is on’

FB: ‘Et has a reset button? Iz it a big button?’

ME: (laughing again): ‘No, it is a little pinhole on the back’

FB: ‘Well, zen you should press it. And if that does not work, send it in. Vile you do dat I will go grab a drive so I know what you are looking at’

ME: (I pull out the firewire cable and plug in the USB again and for some miraculous reason, Vista picks up the USB connection and finds the drive) ‘Ah ha! It worked. Looks like the USB is working again!’

FB: ‘Vell, zat is good. Looks like I was wrong. Have a nice day’

I hung up and broke out laughing. Truly the weirdest call I have had to date.