I figured I might as well just explain what happened myself, since it's easier that way. This happened quite a while back. I think it was somewhere around 1998 or 1999. I had no money for a new box at the time, my mother agreed to pay for it, as long as I bought it from the store that was located in the lobby of the college I was going to at the time. If my memory's good, I was running slack at the time.

When I ordered the machine, I brought in my hdd, that I'd pulled out of my old box, and asked the guy to throw it in the new box, I told him not to touch the data, that it wasn't Windows readable, to just put it in and leave it alone.

It's been a while and I'm not sure exactly how much stuff I had on there, but if my memory's good, there was roughly 1 gig of mp3s on there, all downloaded on DIALUP, in other words, I'd invested a LOT of time into getting those and well most of them weren't exactly common stuff, I don't listen to mainstream bands generally speaking.

Soooo, when I went to pick up the new box, the guy tells me: "Oh, by the way, I couldn't read the hdd you gave me, so I just formatted it.". At that point, it took everything I had not to reach across the counter and choke the guy. I was pissed, and that's a huge understatement. He offered to drive me home, I took him up on the offer, cuz well I didn't really feel like carrying the machine on the subway. The idiot had the guts to try and flirt with me.

Also, when I ordered the machine, I told the guy to make sure that I got an actual modem and not a "winmodem". I explained why and everything, to make sure that he understood that I was serious. After I got home and hooked everything up, I realized I couldn't get online, the idiot had given me a "winmodem" despite the fact I'd made it clear I didn't want one.

I never set foot in that store again, there was no way in hell I'd ever buy anything from them after that, whenever I'd need something for class, like a floppy disk or whatever, I'd walk the 10 blocks or so to get to Futureshop, just so they wouldn't make another penny off me.

I just seem to have the worse luck with this kind of stuff, another time, I upgraded one of my machines, but I was super busy at the time, and well the store I got the parts from offered a free install, so I figured I'd let them install everything. (Swapped CPU, added ram & a new burner) That store was about a 30-40 minutes drive away, but their prices were so low that it was worth it, or so I thought. They called me on a Friday to say I could pick up my machine the next day, but my mom was in town for the weekend, so I told them it'd have to wait til Monday.

When I went to pick up my machine on Monday, they said it wasn't ready, even though they'd called the previous Friday to say that it was. Turns out that someone had walked in to buy a burner, and they gave him mine, since it was the last one they had and ordered another one for me. I ended up driving there I think 4-5 times, which cost me enough in gas that the money I'd saved on the parts was gone. In the end, I had to snap at the guy and curse him out to finally get my machine back. He ended up giving me a different burner, that cost more, but I refused to pay the difference, since well they should not have sold the one I'd bought to someone else in the first place.

After that last one, I did all my upgrades myself. The only reason I'd let them do it was that well that semester I had 4 programming classes, so I didn't exactly have much free time at all.