Some problems take a long time to find, but others are much easier to see.

Imagine a user insisted their computer was broken, and then you discovered that they had unknowingly created the perfect recipe for disaster.

How would you handle it? Would you fix the problem? Or would you just help them start from scratch?

In the following story, one IT worker finds himself in this situation and chooses the latter.

Here’s what happened.

why can’t I burn CDs?

The user complained that her CDs were not burning. (medical records) She was getting random errors like “no permission,” or it would just never give her the option to burn.

I get there and look at it. This CD burner sounds like it’s on death’s door. Grindingish sound, and I can tell it keeps trying to seek data over and over and over.

I eject the disk, and the first thing I notice is that they put an adhesive label on it. I roll my eyes immediately.

Then, he realized the problem was too far already.

Then I flip over the disk and notice the label isn’t even on there all the way. A little bit of it is sticking off the edge. It is a little bit frayed, so im pretty sure it was rubbing against the inside of the drive on something.

Then I look under the disk, and this freshly made disk has scuffs.

I informed her it’s not a great idea to put adhesive labels on these things. So, I ask if she can try one that doesn’t have a label.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have one. She had a spindle with like 50 CDs on it, but they had already pre-labeled all of them……

Went ahead and ordered a new drive and new CDs.

Wow! She learned an important lesson that day!

Let’s see if the readers over at Reddit can relate to this story.

This person was about to do the same thing.

Here’s someone who knows what he’s talking about.

So true.

These sound pretty cool.

This is still a thing?

After all these years, it’s funny to hear someone talk about burning CDs.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.