Taking things apart

From the earliest moments of childhood I can remember, I was taking all sorts of electronic things apart. My fascination with the entrails of telephones spurred from a sense that I had that if I paid close enough attention while taking something apart, I could surely put it back together again. I did this with an old adding machine, a typewriter, and several phones, that I can recall. I precociously figured that everything, when broken down to its basic ingredients, was pretty simple. A telephone was just a conglomeration of lots and lots of simple ideas all thrown together into a functioning instrument. A rocket just represented little basic epiphanies from lots and lots of people, coalesced into a big, heaven-bound man-carrying flare. This reasoning followed with a T.V., an adding machine, a car, really anything else. On a Saturday in the 90's, in Montezuma, Virginia, you could have probably found a curly haired little boy sitting outside on the flagstone patio, or a bushy haired pimple faced teenager, (my grandmother told me that hair was every 80-year-old woman's idea of the perfect permanent. You can't imagine the effect that has on a young boy growing up.) taking some complex electronic tool apart, foolishly expecting to be able to put it back together again. I don't remember taking apart a single thing that didn't have a catastrophic defect when I haphazardly put it back together. I didn't approach the projects like a steadfast Type A person, keeping track of screws and wires. Rather, my approach was more like that of a Type Whatever, scattering parts in a 5 meter radius feverishly aiming for the center of the instrument at hand, and then, with forlorn brow, sunken shoulders, vigilant eyes for parents, and sweaty upper lip, throwing everything back together based upon general shape, not functionality. My wife would probably agree that this is the way I generally approach life, without a whole lot of far-sighted planning for the future, but a tenacious grit for getting to the bottom of things, God forbid I achieve the objective. (As an aside, if you are a graduate admissions council member and have stumbled upon this blog during a google search of my name to see if I have any skeletons in the closet, please recognize the literary embellishment that I am employing.)

So anyways, one would hope that I would grow out of my proclivity towards taking apart rather complex electronic gadgets and leave that to the engineers who understand them. Well, to make a long story short, I have included a picture of a 399 Gigabite external hard drive that was not performing well. I heard a clicking and thought that I could help. It is now awaiting permanent disposal in the family burn pile.