A Laptop Story

So let’s get this right: buying a laptop computer is easy.

Right. Yeah. ‘Course it is.

Simply go to an appropriate shop – butchers, bakers and candlestick makers don’t count – and pick one off the shelves. How remiss of me to not see the blindingly obvious.

It’s just like buying a peach. Test it, of course – squeeze it a little, dig your fingernails in, maybe take a little taste when no one’s looking – and then buy it. Done. Easy. Maybe best to omit the tasting, with a laptop; people tend to look at you curiously – or so I’m told.

I want one – a new laptop, not fruit. Best to do a little research first. Battery life is important and I need it to last all day. Most, even when new, find it difficult to exceed two hours on a full charge – worse after a few months – and that’s about as useful as a bicycle would be to a fish.

I search the internet, read magazines, talk to friends, go to stores and read the specification labels. I stroke them, finger their touch pads with a sensitivity that would get a film an ‘R’ rating and try to envision what each one would feel like in actual use. Sometimes, I even speak to salesmen.

Most are happy to spend a few minutes expounding their knowledge and opinions. It must be a release, talking to someone with an alert brain, after a day of drudgery dealing with tattooed customers sporting hairstyles like weeds and who exhibit the intelligence of a dustbin.

After much research, the choice narrows to just two: an ACER and a Dell. Both are cheaper online but there’s no substitute for touchy-feeliness so I go to the store; returns are so much easier.

CompUSA does not sell Dell but has the ACER on display and in stock, at a price equal to the best available on the internet. It’s a no-brainer. Barely five minutes pass between walking through the doors on the way in and walking back through them with a shiny new box. I am a salesman’s dream.

Three days later, I take it back.

The boredom of waiting for customer service is mitigated by listening intently whilst a latent teenager, wearing over-sized shorts that reveal half his red-checked underwear, tries to argue with the returns clerk about a refund for gaming software. His opinion is that the rules are unfair and that BestBuy are responsible. His argument includes names of game characters with which he expects the clerk to be familiar. He is, undoubtedly, a fine example of the dustbin intelligence class.

Once he’s finished and gone, I explain to the rather impatient clerk, that the laptop keyboard has a mind of its own and frequently produces two or more letters for a single keystroke. A little joke about the thing being possessed by a Godless demon (ha ha) doesn’t produce the desired result and I realize that she’s not the type to see humor in the spoken word and now thinks I am either a religious fanatic or mad.

Turning it on, she wants to know why it took me three days to notice such a fault and I realize that I don’t have much of an explanation but, luckily, the machine boots up just in time and the question is lost in testing. In times gone by, the customer was always right and his word about the unsuitability of a product would be enough to ensure an immediate replacement or refund. Times have changed. Returning items now often involves some degree of negotiation so, as she probably thinks I am insane, I can understand a degree of doubt.

Fortunately, it still doesn’t work – but what would she say if it did? Would I be sent away with a severe reprimand for wasting her time? Perhaps I’d get a slap on the wrist or a poke in the eye with a four gig flash drive for tasking up valuable floor space with my redundant complaint.

She summons an assistant, who disappears into the CompUSA areas of darkness where customers aren’t allowed and returns with a brand new box. Pushing it towards me, the clerk tells me fairly abruptly, as if I am an irritation to whom she is showing a kind favor, that I should realize she’s not going to, “Keep replacing machines.” Perhaps I confused her with my earlier attempt at humor, but her attitude annoys me. This is no way to treat a paying customer with a legitimate complaint, who is reasonable enough to agree to a replacement for a faulty product. BestBuy are less than a mile away and sell both the ACER and the Dell, so I push it back across the counter and demand a full refund.

Ten minutes later I’m listening to a somewhat biased BestBuy salesman rant about the poor quality control of ACER products as opposed to Dell and how he’d never have one in his house unless it was a door stop. Perhaps he’s an ex CompUSA employee. He even persuades me to purchase one that has been optimized – a semi-magic process that supposedly makes it perform faster.

He is successful.

I buy it – the optimized one.

It lasts almost an hour.

The battery unit, I patiently explain to their returns clerk when I go back, does not properly click into position. The locking mechanism is defective. When the computer is placed upon a desk and pulled towards the user, as may well happen in use, the battery often comes out. “Maybe it’s meant to do that,” she suggests slowly, with the innocence of a child expecting the tooth fairy to leave some cash under the pillow. At least she doesn’t think I am mentally deficient.

A new machine appears within minutes. The battery unit is fine and the clerk smiles and makes it click in and out several times, but this unit hasn’t been optimized. They can do it overnight, she says, and it’ll be ready tomorrow. I agree.

So, tomorrow arrives and I collect the newly optimized Dell. Not at 10.00am, as promised, but closer to 5.00pm – they were busy…

The first thing I notice at home is that there is no packaging. Whoever has performed the optimization has discarded all the polythene bags, cable ties and Styrofoam supports and dropped the laptop into the box, where it now flops around like a caught fish on deck. Is everything in there, or are there items missing? I cannot tell. It is a large box with a lot of empty space.

When switched on, it will not completely boot up. A Norton installation screen appears, informing me that an old version of the product has been removed and the machine should now be restarted. Strange, since this is new but, of course – it’s been at the mercy of the BestBuy optimization technician – so I do what it says.

It shuts down, it turns off, there is silence and the blank screen of death shows for a moment or two and then it starts up. As the Windows logo appears once more, so too does the Norton screen, once again requesting a re-boot. A stirring in the pit of my stomach warns me that all is not as it should be but, again, I do as I am told. After five such iterations, I place the machine floppily back into its box.

Am I wrong is thinking that a responsible technician who worked on this machine should have seen this? That he should also not have discarded all the packaging? BestBuy are not yet closed, but I can’t face another confrontation tonight.

There is, however, a full bottle of chardonnay in the fridge and tomorrow is another day….

How many laptops and how many shops will I have to go through to get one that works? Whilst we’re on questions of that nature – why do penguins have wings, how long is the universe and how deep is a hole?