interstice

Lobby for it at a local level and get the ball rolling. It took a while for them to get approval in my city, but it eventually happened.

Edit: Forgot a letter

Having worked and conversed directly with many members of the Data Recovery team, I can assure you that the software that they used was not military. If there was ever a situation that DR couldn't be performed in house, there was a third party company that would remove the platters from the drive in a clean room and attempt it for a hefty fee.

Edit: Grammar

All of your poorly diagnosed hardware was shipped to Geek Squad City, located outside of Louisville, KY. I performed hardware diagnostics and repairs on most major brands there for approximately one year, and occasionally repaired All-In-Ones. The general consensus was that every agent that worked in a BBY was scum, which seems to be the case based on your description of in-store business practices. Many of the Agents that I worked with had no business working there, though most of them were honest hard working people.

Honestly I enjoyed some of the ridiculous things that were sent to us. We frequently received machines with bad power supplies because they were full of cockroaches, or that had spiders in them. There were a few machines that came in with reptiles in them (lizards, and one snake while I was there). Anything with live creatures in it was put in a bag, sealed, boxed, and returned to the store. I had also had the pleasure of returning machines with mold in them, soda, urine, semen (common on the laptop lines), extensive water damage, fire damage, the list goes on.

I will say that Black Tie Protection is good value if you are making electronics purchases from Best Buy. I actually have it on a Keurig that I bought for my girlfriend. If a machine came into the service center under BTP I would fix it no matter what. If the cost of repair was greater than the current retail cost of the machine, it would be junked out and replaced for the customer at no additional cost to them with the option of Data Recovery, which was at that point handled by the stores. I always felt bad doing quotes for CoD repairs, because generally parts cost on the machines sent in wasn't cheap once labor was included. I never attempted to sway a customer to follow through with the repair if it would be better value to buy new, or if I was going to be putting a refurbished motherboard in it that I knew would fail on the 31st day. I can think of many occasions that I would talk people out of expensive repairs that simply didn't know better.