Seven jobs, written up by the people who lost the files.

Common threads across the seven

• Only two of the seven say what the hardware was — an SD card carrying recent wedding shoots, and the hard drive out of a notebook in the last semester of a degree. Both have a page of their own here: camera and SD cards, and disks lifted out of laptops. The other five name what they lost rather than what it sat on — documents, photographs, sensitive data wanted urgently — and never identify the device at all.
• They wrote in from seven different towns — Watford, Mortimer, Hayes, Southampton, Stevenage, Wargrave and Slough, one apiece. Those are the towns the customers gave, printed as they gave them. The bench is in Reading and the media travels to it by post, so where the parcel was handed in has never decided anything about the job.
• Nobody puts a number of days on it — the one customer who writes about time says only that the speed was impressive, and that the frequent updates put his mind at ease while he waited. Another says the data was urgently needed. No timings and no dates were published with these, so none are shown here.
• One line about money in the whole set — documents back “at a price I can afford”. Nobody else mentions the cost, and none of the seven carries a star rating, because none was ever given one.
• What was at stake, in their words — a wedding job no insurance policy covered, the final semester of a degree, sensitive material wanted urgently, and photographs saved after the Mac Store passed the name on. The words they reach for are “vital”, “precious” and “extreme frustration”.

Plainly put: nobody here wrote a word of that. Nothing was purchased, nothing was staged with a stock photograph, and none of the tidying review sites go in for has happened — one review says “a SD card” and gives Photographer a capital P, another capitalises Notebook, a third opens a sentence with “And”, a fourth signs off “engineers, accounts etc!”, and a fifth calls the firm “Reading Data Recovery Company”. All of it stands exactly as typed. The same is asked of you when your own job closes: two or three honest lines, plus your town if naming it does not bother you.