It seems awfully unfair, but wobbly bearing disk drive failures that aren’t head crashes are no respecter of persons, and word comes to us from one of IBM’s competitors that one of the sites hit by problems with its 3380 disk drives is engaged on the most desperately sensitive, classified work for Uncle Sam – all of which made it peculiarly tricky for the engineers who make it their business to go around recovering data from dead disks for dumbfounded customers: bods with appropriate security clearance were found, but when they got to the gate with the old head-disk assembly, which they needed to take back to the lab for examination, they were met with an armed guard who asked menacingly just where do you think you are going with that, chummy, and they were allowed to leave only after Fawn Hall had been summonsed to put the sensitive platters safely through the shredder, leaving IBM’s finest glumly contemplating the shards (we are assured that the story’s true, only the names have been changed to protect innocent and guilty alike).
