I’m sitting in the lobby of some random ass car place getting my…

Something’s getting fixed. It was broken. Now they’re fixing it. Whatever. It’s a running theme these days.

Saturday night, my laptop (the planetclaire.org satellite station) took a turn for the worse and is now waiting for its own exploratory whatever. In the meantime I had to pick up a new laptop.

So I begrudgingly went to the nearest Apple store. I don’t know why, but I hate that place. And it didn’t help that they seemed unwilling to just sell me a damn computer. I needed the most basic little thing available. And I tried telling them that.

Oh no. I really needed to consider the other options. Because wouldn’t I possibly need more power in the future? Or a larger screen? Or the case in black? Only for an extra grand?

Which I’m not totally clear about. The bottom line is that unless you’re editing large videos, audio, layered PS files, a basic model is more than enough power for most people. And everyone around me was mainly asking if they could download pictures from their digital cameras or if their kid could hook up their iPod to the machine. Who the hell needs a 200 gig drive and 20-inch monitor for that?

Apparently a lot of people. Whatever. Anyway, even though it was “highly unusual” for someone to just come in and buy a machine without talking to an Apple consultant (or whatever the kids are calling them these days) they finally—begrudgingly—sold me a computer. Fine.

I got to my apartment, ripped it open, plugged it in and hit the power button.

Nothing.

No ding. No blue screen. No nothin’.

You know how something is supposed to work so easily and when it doesn’t you assume you’re doing something horribly stupidly wrong? That was me for a bit. I tried everything. Starting up off a CD, resetting the PRAM, taking out the battery and resetting to factory specs. Anything.

Nothing.

Finally I called Apple and they couldn’t get anything more out of it than I could so she told me to take it back to the store. In the pouring rain.

I got back and explained the problem and the guy looked at me and said, “You did all these things in two hours?”

No. I did all those things about four times in two hours. How hard is it to try to push some buttons and try to start a computer? Really?

So he sent me to the back and the woman again looked at me kind of funny and said she would have to take it out of the box, test it, and make sure everything was still there.

Fine. Test away. I was actually secretly fearing that it would start up and that I had forgotten to do some sort of Captain Obvious thing to get it going. That would have been

But it didn’t work for her either. So I got a second laptop.

And it’s cute. It’s a MacBook which I think is geared toward students (I think) but it suits me just fine. I’ve got maybe 75% of everything installed and I’ve now got my iPod back up and running.

But I miss my little old Pismo machine. It’s sitting next to me looking so lonely. I tend to get attached to inanimate objects, especially those that techonology labels obsolete. It’s like some old school beat reporter giving up his trusty typewriter for some new fangled model. So I’m hoping it’ll be a cheap fix and I can again use the old guy for some things. I’m tempted to trash OSX off of it and just use it as a Classic Mac.

But we’ll see.