The Rich Irony of Being a Loser

Being a loser: something to avoid. That's what Maxtor reminded us Macworld attendees about in San Francisco. The company campaigned to get us to buy its One Touch backup system, something easy enough that you might really use it. Because backup is that dirty little task we all ought to do more often, like flossing or walking the dog.

In SF, Maxtor started out with giveaways. As soon as we walked out of the Steve Jobs keynote speech, a fellow on Howard Street was passing out black gloves. In packages of three. "Because we know you'll lose one." The theme went on in the show hall, where free t-shirts carried the slogan "I'm a loser." The bookmarks they passed out bore pictures of glum-looking fellows. "I'm a loser," they all began, then explained "I lost all my best party mixes," or "I lost my girlfriend's best pictures."

While we walked the Streets of San Francisco, we saw posters slapped onto construction site plywood, directing us to loserloserloser.com. Yeah, it's pretend blog run by Maxtor with articles on what to do if you lose data. Kind of a "Stewart Smalley" for the computer set.

The irony, you might wonder? Well, you backup because every disk drive fails, at some point. You're only supposed to use a disk drive to back up if you have plenty of them. They won't all fail at once, will they? The computer pros I write about for The 3000 Newswire use tape to backup, or CD media — something besides more disk drives.

And apparently, you can lose data off a OneTouch II, the very device that Maxtor would have you buy to protect your data. Have a look at this user interview on CNET (note that the editors gave the product an 8 out of 10 rating. Apparently didn't have one crash up on them in Windows.