I accidentally deleted thousands of dollars worth of school property
2025/12/30 @ 2:32 AM
The following happened a few months ago.
My school only has one computer that students can use, ( no, I don't live in a developing nation ) and that computer is located in the library. It's essentially a kiosk, running an app loaded up with full copies of thousands of academic texts. A license for said app can cost thousands of dollars depending on what packages it's bundled with. It isn't subscription based, you're buying those books. Our copy was fully specced out.
Since this computer is the only one in my school, I'm often in the library messing around with it. I would do things like change the background to something funny, or dig around random windows utilities. It was blocked on school Wi-Fi, So there wasn't much to do. But I still fucked around with it all the time. There's always plenty to do on a computer if you look hard enough.
Now back to that app: It's not something you download and install - once you buy it, it's actually delivered via mail on a normal SanDisk SSD. It's designed to be fully portable, so this ssd is just permanently plugged in to the computer. And one day, I realized that there was a folder of other apps on that SSD. Among them was a hex editor for some reason, so I got right to work seeing If I could bypass system32 write protections with it. I couldn't, but it made me think, "I wonder if that ssd is write protected?"
I then proceeded to just right click on it in File Explorer, click format, and then hit enter. Honestly, I was around 97% sure that it wouldn't do anything. I mean, really? 4,000 dollars of DRM protected books, left instantly formattable? No company would be as dumb as to do that. Right..? Well, I guess you already know the answer. It was instantly wiped, and I got a little scared, so I closed File Explorer and tried to walk away casually.
You may wonder why this is even a problem, because in most peoples minds digital property can always just be redownloaded at leisure if it's deleted. But in this case, that might not be... the case. In the warranty terms provided on their website, they say something along the lines of "accidental editing of the contents of the drive are not covered in the warranty. " Gulp. (yes I went on their website and read the terms of the warranty when I got home)
The next day my principal came over to me and said, "The library computer doesn't work anymore. Do you have anything to with that?" I said no. He kind of looked at me suspiciously but accepted my answer.
I felt guilty about lying, but my family isn't in a good place financially and I would rather die than force my parents to foot the bill, if the bill does indeed exist. So I kind of put my head down to let it blow over. Maybe a week after it happened, one of my friends (they don't know it was me, I'm the bay harbour deleter) said "[the principal] finally found who did it." I sort of internally laughed, because that either meant the principal was lying to students or I just fucked someone else over. Since then, I haven't heard anything more about it...