Balancing Your Data

Lee Gold once told me a story of a guy who had a hard drive that kept getting errors all the time. After a while, he noticed that errors occurred whenever someone bumped the table that the hard drive was sitting on. Apparently one of the table legs was a little short, and the table would rock, which would cause the hard drive to hiccup. So he looked around for something to stuff under the table leg to shore it up, but all he could find was an old checkbook. So he wadded up the check stubs and stuffed them under the table leg, which seemed to solve the problem.

This has been claimed as the first time someone "used a checkbook to balance a computer".

Talin
San Francisco, CA