My inner pirate bear...

My inner voice is doing impressions, this one is now fondly known as the 'pirate bear' and he sounds a little like this: "grrrr aarrrggghhhh, grrrrr arrrggghhhh".  The reason for the impression?  My laptop came back from Sony today.  Good news?  It's sporting a sparkly new screen and I got a complementary screen wipe; all together now, "ooh ahhh!"  Bad news?  A faint but long scratch on the case that will annoy me every time I see it and a newly replaced hard drive, "restored" (for good measure) to it's OS state.  Not quite what I was expecting, not at all.  The gentleman at Customer Services asked this afternoon if I was happy with the repair: not quite, no.  My stuffed to the gills, fully functional laptop with a couple of lines at the side of the screen is now an empty shell of possibility...  do you think they could possibly return my old hard drive? 

This is where is gets tricky.  It is now the property of Sony; without notification or permission, my electronic life is now the property of Sony. " But we tell you to back it up", they say, and I did but that is not the point.  Yes, the majority of it is backed up, but not the entire 30gb of music, or the odd little programmes I've downloaded and found useful over the years, or my extensive collection of bookmarks in Chrome or the, soon to be quite useful, Christmas Present List!  It was only going in for the screen to be replaced. Moreover, had I had any inkling that my personal property was not going to be returned to me I would have also spent time removing files; photos, work items, copies of legal documents, the list goes on.  It's one thing for that data to be on my hard drive in my laptop, which just happens to need a new screen; it's quite another for it to be now be on my hard drive, somewhere at Sony, ostensibly now their property and with no guarantee of any protection of my rights as its owner.

Oh, and I've just remembered, my cheeks burning in annoyance, my 4000+ font collection: grrrrr aaarrrggghhh, grrrrr arrrrgggghhhh. 

I've been reading a great little book from the office library, How to Work Wonders, all about taking positive thinking, stress management and well being into the workplace.  I may yet be returning it for How to Complain Effectively!