Locke finds a secret hatch leading to an underground area beneath Best Buy. Desmond enters the secret numbers into the Toshiba laptop, blowing up the entire mall. Michael takes Ana Lucia’s gun and kills the whole Geek Squad. The Others kidnap Jack, Sawyer, and Kate and force them to sign statements saying they are satisfied with the service they have received on the island.
No, wait. That’s not it. Here’s what really happened. Despite being told by the Geek Squad Leader that he would be in at 7:30 am Wednesday and that my pc would be his very first project. At end of day, it had not been touched. After another angry email or two to Jill Nezworski, Senior Executive Resolution Specialist, I get this:
Our technician was unable to complete this repair today, my sincere apologies. In an effort to appease our customer and hopefully keep your future business, we will replace the unit with a comparable laptop. Please visit the store with any accessories, manuals, or disks that you still have for the unit. Please visit the customer service desk and ask to speak to a manager on duty regarding an exception email sent from corporate. I trust that they will assist you further with the exchange.
I went home and packed up all my manuals and disks, and brought them back to the store over lunch on Thursday. Waited there for about 45 minutes while they looked for the exception email from corporate. Nobody had it, nobody knew about it. Nobody could do anything. Back to work.
I call the manager, John, around 5pm. All set, he said. They found the email, I could walk in and grab a replacement and be off. Just ask for him. He’ll be there til 8pm.
I show up about 6:10. John is out, they say. Should be back in 5-10 minutes. A half hour goes by. No John. They keep paging him. An hour goes by. Turns out John is actually on “an important phone call” somewhere. About an hour and 15 minutes into my vigil, John appears. He takes me over to the computer showroom, tells me to pick out a comparable model and leaves me with the sales guy. We look around and I pick out a couple of models, but nothing is in stock. I can also choose to upgrade, so I ask to look at a couple of upgrade models, but none of those are in stock either. We checked at least five models that were on the showroom floor and none were in stock. I’m not sure what they actually have in stock, probably just the hot sale items in the Sunday paper brochure.
Anyway, I finally pick out an upgrade model. I can’t tell you how much it pained me to give another dollar to that corporation, but for a really low amount I was able to jump up two notches in processor quality, double the memory, add 20 gigs to the HD, and go from a DVD Rom/CD-R to a dual layer DVD RW.
Of course, since it’s not one of the two pcs they have in stock, I had to order it. But it will be delivered directly to my door from the factory, brand spanking new. So I never have to step into Best Buy again. Actually, if you’ve ever been to Best Buy in Cambridge, you know it’s in a very strategic spot, right at the corner of the mall. I think at least half the people entering or leaving the mall do so by going through Best Buy. I’ll be taking the main entrance from now on.
Well, assuming the delivery goes fine, the story is over. Do I feel victorious? No, actually I just feel exhausted and disgusted. Jill’s last letter actually pissed me off. “In an effort to appease our customer…”??? Like she is doing me a special favor and making special exceptions out of the goodness of her heart, rather than just applying the company’s own policy, not to mention the law of the land. Thanks Jill. I’m actually kind of glad that the computer won’t arrive til next week. Had I brought it home last night, after three hours in Best Buy, I wouldn’t have even wanted to look at it. Now I’ll have a week to chill out and when it arrives, hopefully I’ll be in a better mood and it will be a nice treat.
I will update when it arrives, but the story is pretty much over. Thanks for all the support over the last couple weeks.