Oh I've got a doozy to tell but its mainly bitching so I'll try and keep to teh primary points:

• The power went out in our neighborhood last Friday evening, and when it came back up our DSL router was fried, or more likely, the AC adapter.
• I took the adapter to Best Buy store #499 to get a replacement, because they have an exclusive account so they're the only brick and mortar that sells the router-modem that AT&T/SBCYahoo supports.
• They don't have the adapters in stock, but I could spend $90 to buy a whole new 2Wire gateway. I said that was very crappy support and asked if I was going to need to pitch a fit. The guy I was talking to said "I wouldn't do that if I were you. I'm the manager of this department and we had a guy pitch a fit just a couple days ago, so I called security and had him escorted out." And he said that maybe I could find a suitable adapter in the Home Electronics department, which had an even further annoying tinge since they didn't, and wouldn't. Prick.
  
• So my support options for my broken product (which was behind a surge protector, even) are to do nothing and have no Internet access, to spend $90 on a brand new router even though the old one is probably still just fine with a new $10 AC adapter, or to be escorted out the door by armed guards.
• I went and used their restrooms, then played the demo of Guitar Hero on their Playstation2 for a while to cool down. John the Fisherman, by Primus. I got a "You Rock!" score.
  
• I left the store, and called my sweetie. We decided that what we had on our hands there is an abusive relationship between a corporation (AT&TYahooSBC and BestBuy) and us, their clients, where their solution is to ask for more money without giving any support.
• My sweetie did a google search for Oakland DSL ISPs and we came up with Speakeasy, which is less of a monolithic corporation than AT&T or Comcast, the two main ISPs. I put in the order a week ago, and it's going to be July 24th until everything is up and running.
• And the worst part of it all is that now that we're rolling along on the setup process, I found out that Best Buy (the place where I received threatening verbal abuse as a form of product support) has recently purchased Speakeasy. So we accidentally jumped from one frying pan into a remarkably similar frying pan.

In the meantime, I've been getting a boatload done around the house. In a way, not having the Internet around to distract me at home is very nice. I have not a lot of discipline, so sometimes looking up a word or website from an article or something turns into hours of tangential link-following instead of something more productive. But I do end up learning about the latest robot technologies, or some such other random thing I gravitate toward.

lyrics: "I'm here for the kids." The Frogs, Gather Round for Savior #2.

colors: brown brown brown

mood: tired of being online.

chant/prayer/mantra:
ghufranaka rabanna wa elayka l massir
allah huma aoudo beekah min al khobti

pax hominibus,
joel

here's one that i generated quite some time ago that i really like.


lyrics: what's going on? - marvin gaye

mood: exasperated. had a bad day waiting in line at best buy store #499, then picking up our "fixed" laptop, only to have to drive back and wait in line to give it to them, after they put it back together with a missing switch, so that we can't access the internet with it. in other words, they fixed the problem and created a new one. and we will have to go without our laptop for two more weeks. :(

when i asked the geeksquad guy behind the counter if we could get an extension on the warranty or credit of some type for this total mess up on their part, i could tell he was doing his best to NOT offer anything of value to replace our lost use of the laptop and my lost saturday. what he did offer was that they would ship the laptop back out for re-repairing using overnight delivery, so that the people who made the mistake would get the laptop on monday. needless to say, we will still not ever be buying anything from best buy again, and i will heartily recommend to any readers or friends that they do likewise.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: art, computers, fractal art, indifferent corporations