No matter how many exclamation points you use, thousands of users have flashed their emmcs and I haven't seen one believable claim that flashing made their N900s unusable.

I would happily buy your N900 but I have a feeling Nokia has it.

I worked in computer tech support for more than eight years and I know for a fact that techs often say that devices are not fixable when they are. They can only spend so much time on a problem and many factors make them give up unnecessarily.