Fried Chicken Drive Tragedy Is Finally Over

While watching the BG Minnesota game my cell phone started singing. I looked down and it was a picture of The Wife. I'm guessing she is wondering how the game is going, but I was wrong she had received another phone call from Best Buy (Yet again they don't call me). Our new external hard drive is done and we can pick it up. If it wasn't Best Buy the story should have ended right there. Reggie the manager then proceeds to tell The Wife that they waived the pairs fees, but he would have to charge us for parts and labor. If it wasn't for the fact she told me I could not talk until she had finished the story I would have hung up and called my "Good Friend" Reggie and made him cry or give us a flat screen TV.

They wanted us to pay $90 for labor, of course The Wife argues that he had never mentioned us paying for this. Hell, I could have bought an external case and done it myself, I'm not paying that much for something I could have done. Well, Reggie remembered that during previous conversations that I was looking to buy an external hard drive and thought we would graciously pay $90 for the drive. The only problem is The Wife didn't want to pay for something that was suppose to be free, you know because Best Buy royally screwed up.

After a 10 minute conversation Reggie admitted that he talks to so many people that he could remember everything that was said, yet he remembered a small detail like I was wanting a new hard drive... every convenient. So he gave up and we got the drive for the original price of us not calling his manager. Most of the information is there, we are missing a few small documents, but nothing that's life threatening. I hope I never have to take the computer back to the Geek Square.

Me against the Geeks

Have you ever had one of those moments you knew something was wrong and if you did nothing things would get worse? This afternoon was one of them, I've mentioned in the past that the DVD drive in our computer went down and we had to take it to the Geek Squad at Best Buy. I was sitting around and I kept thinking, it's been a week, I need to call and see if the computer is ready.

I call and they can't find the work order... bad sign number 1. I call The Wife to call, because she as all the info with her. She calls me back with the reply "Your not going to be happy and you're probably call and yell at them." About two hours earlier they sent the computer to Hewlett Packard and it's going to be another two weeks (I'm confused with a little bit of anger with that). The reason they sent it out today was they tried call all week, but never got a reply. They decided to call the old house number that was on the original receipt. Could be considered an honest mistake until you realize that they require alternative numbers when we turned in the computer to get it fixed. They had BOTH cell phone numbers. The kid tried to put the blame on The Wife; all she had to do was change the number with customer services and none of this would have happened. No you young punk, you had two other numbers and no one called them. That sent me over the edge and I immediately called them to get answers.

After multiple calls and being told to calm down (I may have yelled, but I did have a little decorum, I did not call the guy names and did not you an profanity. My goal was to show anger with my voice, try not to demand anything but make sure they understand I am going to swallow someone's soul if this does not get fixed) they finally give an OK solution. They are going to upgrade the computer so that I get an extra gigabyte of RAM and I get a dual possessor, that soothed me a bit. They got a hold of UPS and the computer is still in town and they are going to get it back and I may get some of the info on the old computer back. We can get all files back, but we have to reinstall all programs. This causes a few problems, I have a Strat-O-Matic baseball game and I have to call the company and get all the codes reactivated... that can take a week.

I was content with everything and I am ready to leave, they hand me the paperwork, but no computer. They have to install all the anti-virus and spyware so I now get put to the back of that line. We may see the computer tomorrow. Once the warranty expires I am not going back to the Geek Squad, I'd rather go to the little mom and pop place in Wake Forest that has helped us in the past.

Lots to Talk About

For most people Monday is the start of their week, for me, Monday is my Wednesday, which usually means it's not very exciting or filled with interesting tidbits that I would wish to share, but today for some strange reason everything seemed like I should write about it, so for the second straight post here is a little thing I like to call Random Items.




My Nose is Running A Marathon
Some of you may realize that my car is not yellow but silver. For the past few weeks, I thought I some how slept walked and painted my car yellow. The picture is not the best in the world, but my car is covered in pine pollen. This stuff is everywhere, our cars, windows, sidewalks, puddles of water, you name it, it has this yellow crap all over it. This pollen is too big for me to inhale it and make my allergies go haywire like it did not so long ago, but every other type of tree and plant is throwing off pollen and I feel like I'm going to die. I can't breath, I cough till my eyes and lungs hurt. My throat is sore to the point where I can not talk at times. It is insane, Ive been told that this is the worst season in recorded history for pollen in North Carolina, so of course it's my first year here. I've been on a cocktail of allergy medicine ranging from Claritin, Benadryl, Sudafed with pseudoephedrine, Sudafed with that other crap that's not as good as pseudoephedrine and Mucinex. One drug does not seem to be enough. Claritin gets me to the point where I can sort of breath, Mucinex will clean me up, but you can only take it once every 12 hours. I think I'm becoming immune to Sudafen. Benadryl works, but it has the tendency to make people drowsy, in my case "may cause drowsiness" means will knock you on your ass till it's out of your system. Hopefully with the nation wide cool down the trees will stop trying to create little sapling and go back to normal.



More Computer Fun

The new computer is up and running so The Wife and I thought it would be a good idea and see if some one can transfer all the files off the old computer onto the new one. We decided to try the Geek Squad at Best Buy, because we bought the computerfrom Best Buy. I walk in with old tower in hand. I go to the counter and the geek gives me the run down and I already know they are going to charge $156 dollars plus tax for the transfer, I except the large payment and then I'm told "It's going to be 3 to 5 days before we can get to your computer." WHAT, three to five days? I can get a new transmission put in my car within two days, why so long? Well I guess they are "really busy" and have a lot of people ahead of me. That's not a good enough answer, I mean what kind of staff do they have? One monkey with a mallet and a screw driver?

Thing about it this way, if one guy works on a computer and gets it done in an hour he theoretically can complete 6 in a given work day. Think about it some computers will take less than an hour while some will take more, that's a good average for a day, I would think it would be more, but I have been wrong before. They are open from 10am till 9pm so that's 11 hours and if you have 6 people on average per day that's about 36 computers per day, that means you would have 108-180 computers ahead of me and I don't think they would have that many computers at one time in their stock room. So I tell the guy to shove off.

I remember for some strange reason a computer shop in downtown Wake Forest I go there they tell me it can be done within two hours and will only cost me $50 and hour. Hell yeah! Even if they have a problem and go three hours that's still less than those other bastards! I drop off the computers, tell them which files to transfer and I'm on my way. Much later in the day I get a call (they forgot to inform me that there were other people ahead of me and that the two hours was the working time not actual finishing time) and come to find out that the problem with the computer was not the motherboard or the CPU but the hard drive itself. Since is was older and we were stupid and left it on for days on end the barrings gave out and everything is lost.

So what's the damage: over 3000 photos, over 4000 songs, all of The Wife's financial information for this year and a honeymoon video I made for The Wife. Part of the photos are lost forever, including all the pictures we took on our digital camera dating back to the honeymoon I think that's the worst blow to me. We also lost about 1/3 of our music collection. When we moved we thought we would be smart in selling a large portion of our CD collection, but burn the songs we like. I know that's sort of illegal, but we were saving space and in doing so we now have to go out and buy a lot of those songs now. The lesson we learned is we need to back everything up to a CD, flash drive or possibly to a new external hard drive for safe keeping.

New Shift

I started part of my new schedule today, 3-midnight. I will be honest it was a lot more work than being day side. We did a live shot and package for the 7pm show and then did a live and package for the 11pm. You have to realize, that normally the day side crews get from 9-6ish to get a story done for the 6 or 7pm shows. We did not start our story till almost 3:30. Lets just say we were in a little bit of a rush to get things done. My reporter actually lost track of time and did not realize that it was 6:30 and he was still writing. I get in there and crank out a short package within 15 minutes, feed back to the station and finish the set up for the live shot. It was very hectic for that last half an hour. Things calmed down for the late show, but still it was work.

While reading the above paragraph you might think I am complaining. For some strange reason to be honest that is not a complain, it was busy, but I enjoyed it. For so long at The Network, we really did not have deadlines or if we did they were always soft and could be pushed back. I think it made me a little lazy and complacent, I missed the rush of scrambling to get things done. Do I want this every day? Hell no, but it's nice to get that feeling back and know I can get things done when things are tight.