elevatorium.org

I am having serious trouble yet again on what to write about or if I should even write at all, however!!!

This week brings some new additions to office and office annex.

Yes, I now have to have an “office annex,” because I am a computer hoarder and the record collection is growing, tee hee.

I bought a used Mac Pro 4,1 (Early 2009) off eBay to create a scanning station and a macOS seedbox for the office annex. I also bought a Plustek scanner so I can scan better-looking album artwork. I would like to re-enter the music piracy space, so I need a proper graphic designer scanner that has different scanning technology. I bought upgrades for the used Mac Pro, too, because initially I wanted to make it match my Mac Pro 5,1 (Mid 2010). And now since I kind of royally fucked up, I’m pretty sure the processor tray in the 4,1, is going to be busted, so I bought a fully loaded CPU tray from another eBay seller. See, I bought separate 3.46GHz CPUs like I did for the 5,1, I even bought the same amount of RAM: 48GB. I bought an 18TB HDD, and even the same parts for the internal SSD upgrade.

Now you’re wondering why I bought another tray, right? Well, I kind of didn’t research the upgrade fully, because I did my 5,1 so quickly, my silly assumptions thought this 4,1 to 5,1 conversion was going to be slightly the same. Oh, I forgot to tell you! I bought the CPUs still lidded, so I had to buy the handheld de-lidder. That went smoothly, yay! Before the used 4,1 arrived, the CPUs and de-lidding tool came, so I did that before anything and then kept the newly de-lidded CPUs in their little anti-static bags.

Ultimately, I didn’t realize the thermal pads on the CPU heatsinks were thicker than they should’ve been, because the seller installed LIDDED CPUs. Lovely. After about two weeks of going bonkers wondering why it partially works to not working at all, I finally caved and reached out to the seller via eMail. I had to reach out via eMail, because the seller never replied to my initial message right after I bought the computer. Consider that Yellow Flag No. 1.

Through several exceptionally kindly-written eMails, the seller offered to take care of the upgrade for me, and completely for free. Of course, they never mentioned how to properly and securely *pack* said CPU tray. They requested I send my CPUs with my RAM and the processor tray. You know what? I’m embarrassed to myself on how pathetic I packaged everything. I thought I did a great job at the time, because I was under the impression everything was being replaced; besides, when I first received the Mac Pro, the first thing I did was run Apple Service Diagnostics on it, and noticed the only thing that reported off was the BOOST B fan. It already arrived with a minor issue, but I figured since I was upgrading the CPUs, I would be able to re-tighten the CPU heatsinks, and then BOOST A would be back to normal because it would be a proper lidless CPU.

See, that’s where I can already see more yellow flags. Clearly the seller knew how to firmware flash the 4,1 to a 5,1. However, instead of investing in the delidding vice, and de-lidding the CPUs, he just installed them with lids, and had to raise the heatsink CPU thermal pads to 5mm.

Crap started to get really weird when I noticed the seller dropped all kinds of communication after I sent my package. I think 2 weeks went by, maybe even three before I was like, okay, time to reach out, because this should have been more than enough time to complete it. After two eMails, I reached out to eBay and told them the situation. Ironically, that same day, well, first I called his personal cell number, but it didn’t even ring, it shot straight to voicemail. I left a voicemail and requested either a call back or a reply to my eMails, but nothing. Later on in the evening is when I reached out to eBay via live chat, explained my situation, and I attempted to get a return request, because by that point it’s been THREE months into this whole project, and I was just getting livid than an idea I had took forever and a day to get accomplished. Again, I blame myself, because if I just slowed down a tad more, I would have done the upgrade just fine.

After eBay reached out to the seller, I received this lengthy, super-detailed eMail on how they take photos of everything that gets delivered, and apparently the way it was shipped caused some pins in the CPU A socket to get bent. He proceeded to tell me the processor tray is now a dead paperweight. Hey seller, guess what? You can always bend the pins back with a black stick or a toothpick. Come on, man, I’m a former Mac Genius, for fuck’s sake. I’ve built PCs. I know what’s up. They included a boatload of photos, too. Okay, so now apparently since they thought I didn’t know better, I was given three options: Have my parts sent back to me as is free of charge, buy a replacement tray from the seller for $249, and he would “get started right away” with the complete upgrade, or find a replacement tray and send it in to him.

And this very situation, people, this is exactly why I hated working with hardware when I was a Certified Macintosh Technician. Obviously the seller wasn’t that well-versed with CPU sockets, or maybe he is, but just did not want to be bothered attempting to bend back pins. It’s exceptionally simple to remove damaged parts and replace with known-working ones. That’s why the fellow Genii I worked with *loved* being in the back doing repairs. They were enthralled with the process of “remove and replace.” I was the only Genius who not only loved being out at the Bar, but I was exceptional at it. That’s where the brain power was at. You had to know a boatload about not only Mac OS X/macOS, but the variety of software available, and why certain things wouldn’t work. I’ll give you two hilarious examples. Early on, I was working the Bar very early in the morning, and a woman was attempting to decompress a .zip archive of a Photoshop file. She was with a Genius for over 45 minutes, I literally had nobody until after 10a. Anyway, I’m doing my thing, yet still eavesdropping, and I notice the Genius attempt to get some free decompressing application from the Mac App Store, and I’m thinking to myself, “Come on, use The Unarchiver, it eats through any archive, damaged or not.” Eventually the Genius went into the back probably to consult with whomever was there, and since they didn’t come back too quickly, in my charming Libra self I slid over and said hello to the customer, and asked what was going on. She told me about the zipped Photoshop file not decompressing no matter if they were using Mac OS X’s built-in Archive Utility or anything else. I asked her what the Genius did, and she showed me the 1 archiving app they grabbed, and I knew it wasn’t going to do anything. I asked her if I could grab another freeware app to see what it would do, and the poor woman was so desperate, she immediate agreed. While the Genius could have just asked me to take a look, instead they avoided me like the plague. I went to download The Unarchiver, and after it was installed, literally just dragged the broken .zip file over the icon, it decompressed fine, and we opened it in Photoshop to ensure it opened. Boom! Perfect .psd! And that’s when the Genius came back and saw I resolved the issue in less than five fucking minutes. If they didn’t have so much ego, they could have learned something super quick. After being praised by the customer, she left a very happy woman. And yes, the Genius asked me how did I do that, and I’m like, “after doing piracy for so long, you know what works best for the application you need it for.” 😉 Hahahahaha, oh man…

And the other story happened late in the day. I think I was already in the back, I do not remember, but I might have come out for something and there was only one Genius at the bar who was with a man in a business suit. i was immediately dragged into that one, and the Genius explained the situation. Apparently the man tends to remotely connect to his office with Citrex. Oh wait, Citrex! I used to use that shit back in my EDI processing days! And they weren’t able to move forward with something. However, they were using the Java client, so wat do we do, kids, when an application isn’t fully connecting to something? We delete/clear out its…………………………cache! Yay! And I did that in less than 5 minutes, and yet again, it worked like a charm. I was asked again by the Genius how did I know how to do that, I believe right in front of the customer, too, because he also was mind blown, and I said I used to work in an office that used the same software, and when it clogged, we clear its cache and yadda, yadda, yadda, you can connect remotely now, lol! I saved a lot of Genii with software issues. Sometimes they took advantage and left me with like 5 computers doing “Archive & Installs” right before my lunch break.

Anyway, of course, these two stories are irrelevant to this entire post, but the used Mac Pro seller reminded me of the Genii I worked with. No one bothered, let alone even cared, about software. As long as they knew how to read manuals to remove and replace hardware, that seemed to be the only thing they cared about. It was my naïvety, too, thinking all Mac Genii were pirates, hahahaha! One would think that’s why they wanted to be there, to get that much closer to the troubleshooting process. I guess that was only me in that bunch. However, in another store I used to help out at, the Genii there were much more in the same vein as me. It just sucked it was much further from home than the store I was at was. Shit, my store was five-ten minutes away, and the other one was 30-35 minutes away. I remember once my “manager” asked me if I was interested in transferring to the other store, ha, why? They didn’t need me as bad as you Genii did. Not only that, I don’t think that particular manager had a clue about Apple. They managed some big-name sneaker retail outfit. What in the fuck are you doing here if you haven’t a clue?! Thankfully people also agreed with that sentiment, and the ended up getting transferred. However, the replacement was way worse, ha! You know, I am terribly sorry for getting completely off-topic, but I just find it so mind blowing how that store segregated itself so hard until I arrived. None of the Genii had lunch in the break room, they all went together to the food court. No one even talked to each other until I broke that dumb, high-school habit. I was having a hoagie, I think, in the break room, and a Specialist asked me what I was doing. I said I’m eating my lunch, hahaha, and they’re like, yeah, but you’re a Genius, you are supposed to have lunch with the other Genii, and then I busted out laughing. That’s when I learned how the culture in that particular store blew ass. I was like, “Without you, we’d have nothing to fucking fix!” Wow… after all this time I am still shocked how shit ran there.