Cybersecurity worker stops trying to help his aunt after she throws a laptop down her stairs, loses 6 years of photos, and accuses the tech-savvy nephew of hiding a magic fix

• 
  via Kyle Loftus

  Man sitting at a wooden table using a laptop while holding a cup of coffee in a cozy café setting.

  ^{Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}

• Entitled Aunt thought I could recover 6 years of photos from a destroyed laptop in “five minutes”

  
  via Thee_onchocker
• 
  via Thee_onchocker
• 
  via Thee_onchocker

• Not dropped, not knocked off a table by accident, but actually thrown down a staircase, and then carried over to a family member with the energy of someone returning a defective blender, demanding six years of family photos recovered by end of day. The drive was clicking, the casing was bent, the screen was destroyed, and the whole machine was encrypted with BitLocker with no recovery key and no backups anywhere in sight. When told that physical damage cannot be fixed with a software tool and that a professional lab was the only realistic option, she did not pause to consider any of that. She went straight to conspiracy, deciding that the nephew knew a secret trick and was simply refusing to use it, hiding the easy solution out of pettiness or family politics or whatever story made her the victim of this situation she created.

• 
  via Thee_onchocker
• 
  via Thee_onchocker
• 
  via Jonathan Kemper

  Man in a hoodie working on a laptop at a wooden table against a brick wall.

  ^{Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}

• 
  via Thee_onchocker
• 
  via Thee_onchocker
• 
  via Thee_onchocker
• 
  via Thee_onchocker

• This is what the brain does when a person has spent years not backing up their photos, not learning anything about the devices they depend on every day, and not taking a single breath of responsibility for the object they personally launched down a staircase. It cannot land on accountability, so it lands on betrayal instead.

• 
  via Thee_onchocker
• 
  via Thee_onchocker
• 
  via Thee_onchocker
• 
  via Thee_onchocker

• The BitLocker encryption alone should have ended the conversation, because even a professional recovery lab would need that key to do anything useful. But a real solution that costs money and takes time and still might not work was clearly not what she came for. She came for magic, delivered free and fast and without any inconvenient explanations attached to it.

• 
  via Thee_onchocker
• 
  via Thee_onchocker

• And so out came the friend's son who is apparently wonderful with computers and could probably sort the whole thing out in minutes, which, sure, let him have it and let him be the one standing there explaining that a clicking drive does not respond to optimism.

• 
  via Thee_onchocker

• Calling the mother afterward to report it was the only move left, because getting honest information from someone who was trying to help apparently qualifies as an attack when you were really hoping for a miracle.

• 
  via Thee_onchocker
• 
  via Thee_onchocker
• 
  via Thee_onchocker
• 
  via Thee_onchocker
• 
  via Thee_onchocker

Tags