Somehow, I’ve become one of them.
The first mistake, I think, was to buy a Mac. My reasoning at the time, I maintain, was perfectly reasonable: having worked with computers for more than a decade, I was thoroughly sick of looking at their insides. So when a well-dressed bunch of Californians offered a sexy-looking powerhouse of a laptop that was, most importantly, welded closed, I handed over my credit card on bended knee. Even though it’s no more reliable than anything I had before, being able to overcome the urge to explore its irritating nuances down to the last component is an enormous relief. I continue to earn a living by fixing difficult problems but, in my head, keeping my own laptop working is someone else’s problem. Hoorah! But the Californians won’t let it end there. The laptop may be a silver box full of wires and circuit boards, but they insist on going around telling everyone it’s a “lifestyle choice”.
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Me: “Hello, I’d like a Mac please.”
Them: “Sure! No problem! MacBook Pro, is it?”
Me: “That’ll do nicely. Here’s my credit card.”
Them: “Great! Super! We’ll post it to you!”
(a pause)
Me: “Erm, weren’t you going to, like, post me a Mac?”
Them: “Oh, right! Sure! No problem!”
(a pause)
Them: “Hey! You can’t really have that Mac we promised. But! How’s about we send you an even better one we just invented?”
Me: “How kind.”
(a pause)
Me: “Erm, any chance of… erm…”
Them: “Sure! Yes! Absolutely!”
(a pause)
Them: “Got it yet?”
Me: “Err… no.”
Them: “Bummer!”
Someone else: “I got your Mac right here. Tomorrow?”
Me: “Wonderful.”
(a pause)
Me: “Doesn’t work.”
Them: “Doesn’t work?”
Me: “Kernel panics on startup. Kernel panics on reinstall. Doesn’t charge. Oh, and two dead pixels.”
Them: “Bummer! That sucks ass! We’ll pick it up and put you down for another one.”
Me: “Okay, when will I see that?”
Them: “Erm… oooh…”
(a pause)
Not a lot happened during the day, so I spent some time hunting around for interesting websites. I failed. One marginally interesting discovery though: normally, one would expect a URL to bare some relevance to the content of its site. Not so with robinhood.com. Any Macintosh experts out there—I want an explanation for this one.