Retail Musings: The Stolen Laptop
Time for another story of retail mischief. We journey back to my Staples days, and an intriguing little moment one evening.
One of the skills I learned at Staples was how to reset a laptop to factory settings. The general process does not dramatically vary from one brand to another, though the keyboard commands can be a little different. The bottom line is that if you do it correctly, you can wipe a laptop clean, and remove any and all passwords in the process. Hence the term ‘factory settings’. During one late shift, I had a fella come into the store who wanted me to do just that, for a laptop that he had allegedly bought from a friend. I say allegedly, because there were several red flags with his request.
Laptops that are sold via places like Staples (and PC World, and other retailers) are preloaded with Microsoft Windows, and it is virtually always the Home edition. You can often go into a retailer and buy the Professional edition, but what you won’t find preloaded on any personal laptop is the Enterprise edition. This has nothing to do with the good star-ship of the same name, but instead, it is a version of Windows supplied to corporations and companies. This was the first red flag, for this guy’s laptop was running on this. He (or his ‘mate’) clearly did not buy it in a shop!
The other red flag was even more obvious. Not only did the laptop have a sticker under the keyboard that said it belonged to a local council, the very screen itself displayed the same message! This was all the proof I needed to conclude the laptop was stolen, and I made a point of suggesting to this guy that his friend was handling stolen goods. I refused to do anything with it, and the bloke made a show of getting on the phone to talk to his friend as he left the store. I was never completely convinced that he was the one who had nicked it, but I remain very convinced to this very day that someone had stolen it.