High-Tech Healer
Just about everyone who has worked on a computer for long has experienced the full-body terror of a system crash. And when hard drives die, their shocked and rattled operators sometimes feel like their whole world has collapsed.
Enter Nikki Stange, a crisis counselor for DriveSavers, a Novato-based company that specializes in recovering data from crashed or damaged hard drives. Stange’s job is to help people deal with the panic that sets in when their computers cut out.
Her duties have evolved since she joined the company in 1990. At the time there were only five employees who shared several tasks, including handling incoming phone calls. Distraught customers were forwarded to Stange because she has a background in psychology and once worked on a suicide crisis line.
Her training and her patience come in handy. “I’m there to listen and hear their story,” Stange said. “I invite the customer to tell me what happened to their computer--what did they do, what were they thinking, what emotions were they experiencing. It helps for the customer to vent and release those emotions. Just the simple act of stating them to another human being reduces the intensity.”
Since people in crisis often exaggerate or minimize the damage they face, this initial step needs to be taken before an accurate assessment of the problem can be made.
“People can project their worries so far forward when they realize that their computers have crashed,” Stange said, “that they’re imagining themselves out on the street, alone and homeless. I ask people to tell me what is their worst fear, what are they most worried about. Just talking about those worries and fears helps bring people back to the present so they can look at what’s really going on.”
Stange’s counseling skills are regularly tested to their limits. “Our customers are not in crisis because they’ve lost a letter or a month’s worth of e-mail,” she said. “They’re in crisis because they’ve lost years of building a small business or lost corporate information that hundreds of people are depending on.”
Among her callers were a writer who lost nine years of work on a novel, and a New York publisher who had the biggest book catalog in the history of the company on a 9-gigabyte drive that failed three days before its print deadline.
Fortunately her co-workers are experts at data retrieval. For example, one client was an entertainer who’d taken her laptop on a boat trip up the Amazon. The boat hit a submerged barge and sank, dragging her computer and all her booking and financial information down with it. The woman retrieved the computer and took it to her regular service tech. When he told her that the data could not be recovered, she shipped the water-logged remains to DriveSavers-- which returned all of her data to her a few days later.
Then there is Bettie-Jeanne Darby, a dance instructor who bought a new computer because her old one no longer made backups. A week after all the data had been lap-linked over from her old computer and the old hard disk reformatted, the new computer crashed.
“When I realized that all my business records and dance sheets were gone, my legs buckled,” Darby said. “It was like someone had died.” Not knowing what to expect, Darby called DriveSavers, then burst into tears.
“Nikki was wonderful,” Darby said. “She helped me deal with all the anger and the grief. Now I call her my ‘computer psychiatrist.’ ”
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Freelance writer Kate Dunn can be reached at katedunn@earthlink.net.
