I was repairing a broken PC and had finally narrowed the failure down to a dead COM port. I didn’t have a spare I/O board in stock, so I headed down to the local PC shop, which I had avoided as much as possible up until now — too many horror stories about them were making the rounds.

At the counter of the shop (which, by the way, “specialized” in PC repairs and upgrades) I asked for an I/O card. The person behind the counter just stared at me blankly. I rephrased my request and asked for a serial card. Still the blank look. Just then, someone walked up from the back room, where he had been jabbing at the interior of an open PC with a screwdriver.

“This guy wants a serial card,” said the first one to the second.

“Oh, no problem. We’ve got plenty of those around here somewhere,” the second person said. I was relieved that I would be able to get the system online that day instead of having to wait over the weekend for a replacement part in the mail.

After ten minutes of searching high and low, he brought me the “serial cards” he was proud to have found. It was a 10-pack of the aluminized serial number identification tags that you can stick to your system for inventory control.

I looked at it, turned, and walked away without a word.