OK, let me get this straight.
Between your arrival at about 1:30 PM and whenever you returned to his office from the other tenant's unit he suddenly had a catastrophic computer failure.
It was working fine just before you arrived but for some reason he didn't let you actually see that for yourself first.
He could somehow, by using another machine in the office while not observed by yourself, determined that the data on a non-spinning drive could not be accessed.
???
Sounds like he had a drive go belly up with data on it that he needed and knew how much it costs to retrieve it and wanted someone else to pay for it.
He needs to be spanked.
