Adventures in Computing

Lancelot the Laptop update: So, I called yesterday. (I’d called on Monday, and they told me they were still trying to figure out what was wrong, but since I hadn’t heard a word, I thought I’d try again.) At first the lady who answered gave me the whole “be patient” spiel, but then I said, “Okay, I know you all are swamped, but you told me on Sunday that worst case scenario, it would be back in 7-10 days, and it’s been 5 and it’s not even out yet.” She said, “Wait a minute, you brought it here on Sunday? Please hold.” A minute later she came back. “It’s not the hardware, it’s the software, and we’re working on it now.”

So that was cool. In other news, I asked her if it was the “Apple virus” and she cracked up, saying that not only was it not the Apple virus, because you have to actually download a photo from someone you don’t know through iChat and install it on your harddrive, and I’m not doing that, am I, but also, the virus doesn’t do anything, and stop reading scary articles. (Funny, my agent said the exact same thing to me earlier this week when we were having “shop talk.” I’m clearly a neurotic freak.)

And then she said that she couldn’t stress enough how important it was for me to be backing up my files on something external. And I said, “like .mac accounts?” and she said, “nooooo, because that’s only a gig,” and I said, “oh, like flash drives?” and she said, “noooooo, something much bigger,” and I said, “like what?” and she said, “something bigger,” and at that point, I began to feel less like I was engaging in a commercial conversation with a customer service representative and more like I was playing a game of twenty questions and I asked her straight out what she would recommend. I think they might be prevented from actually recommending a product to me. She said, “like a DVD,” but I said that Lancelot the Laptop (which I did not call that to the Apple employee, what do you take me for?) didn’t actually have a DVD burner on it, and then she made a few more cryptic comments, none of which were actually, “come down to the store and buy this external backup thingy that we sell it’s so great and it’s only $399.99 but it comes with a free iShuffle,” which I think I would have appreciated, since it would have been so much easier than me trying to guess what she was talking around. I have a sneaking suspicion that the reason she couldn’t tell me what she was talking about was because perhaps it was made by The Enemy.

Note: I do not call them The Enemy, mind you. But some Appley people do, and those people probably include the ones that write the behavior manual for employees at Apple Stores.

Anyway, I like the Apple Store people. I want to buy them all a drink. But I can’t, because if I have to pay for this repair and/or buy a new ‘puter, then I will be a connosieur of ramen for several months. I will definitely have to curtail my sushi habit, that’s for damn sure. (It is a habit, by the way. Totally addictive. I get cravings.)

In vaguely related news, I have turned in my proposal for SSG2 to my editor. Yay!