Today and the last few days have been full of computers and other machines being difficult. I know nothing about and do not believe in astrology, but once I heard that when Mercury is in retrograde, communication and technology goes wrong. So I always think about that when machines start really fucking up more than usual - and the usual is a lot, actually.
So, yesterday I took my ibook into MacForce. The video cable was frayed, stupid design flaw on Apple's part. This MacForce place is one of those parasitical places that preys on people who are either ignorant, or have expense accounts, or both. I saw one poor guy who was bringing his G5 tower in to have a new harddrive added to it. Dude, you could do that yourself in 15 minutes, don't pay these slobs $90 for an hour of labor!!!
Anyway, they also preyed on me because taking apart an ibook's display is not on my list of desired activities. Luckily it WAS only the video cable, so they do the work and i'm only $190 poorer (that's a month's living expenses for 4 Bolivian peasants). So anyway I get it home and I have almost zero wireless reception. I'd already read about how the Airport antenna is in the display, so obviously the repairdude had fucked up the antenna during his operations. So I'm pretty mad, and then today I take it in and i have to keep coming back cuz they take longer to correct their error than then predict, and it just fucks with my whole day, so finally when they're done I stand up for myself, which I don't normally do, and I say, hey, I think you should compensate me for this, and so I get to talk to a manager and he almost laughs cuz he's apparently so shocked that someone would ask this but i stick to my guns, is say, well, it's your mistake, I'm a consultant, I get paid for my time and i've lost lots of time today because of your mistake. Eventually he reluctantly agrees to knock $25 off the original repair charge.
Might not seem like a big deal but like I said, I don't usually stand up for myself like that. Normally i'd rationalize to myself how it's not really their fault and shit happens and blah blah and then just meekly shuffle off. but not today.
Meanwhile, "indian summer" has kicked in here, it was BEAUTIFUL today and that's great if only i wasn't so damn busy and i could enjoy the sun and the warmth. I'm too busy getting stuff done so that I can go to Mexico and enjoy sun, warmth, and the fallout of globalization. More on that soon...
Posted by steev at Septiembre 23, 2004 06:30 PM