Ah, the waters are receding

Whatever torture I have so richly deserved for the past weeks (and months, and years, but who's counting?) has thankfully begun to subside these last few days. My laptop is still wheezing but working, the Dell CDs came next-day via special delivery, and my DSL guy finally came out and put my signal back on its feet and off of its knees. It's almost like I can breathe again.

The upside is that I had begun to find things to do in the analog world: my wife re-upped my subscription to a real, ink-and-paper newspaper service, I cleaned up the place, and some other stuff that was worthwhile and non-digital. Maybe now though, I can meld the two, or at least read my little daily list of bookmarked pages with my morning coffee, as God intended.

Whatever sentence I've been serving in digital limbo/Hell, I am glad to be at least on probation. Let's hope I stay on the Digital Deity's good side. Amen.

Rick is the best friend I never met

Rick at Dell, now my most faithful reader (certainly among the most helpful) has left another comment, this time explaining that Dell has resumed the normal and ethical practice of providing the reinstallation CDs for paying customers. Thank God for that.

Thank Him/Her also that Rick let me know, as I have been unable to access the Dell website to research for myself my previous assertion that they just don't send them anymore. I'm glad Rick set it straight.

"Be cool, dude..."

My laptop continues to subsist on quasi-life support. It works, but every boot-up could be its last. Preceding each boot is an error message warning that hard drive failure is imminent, and I should back up my crap and get a new hard drive. Better advice was seldom given.

The thing reminds me of the friend we all had (or were) in high school, who no matter how loaded he was, no matter how slobbering, falling-down wasted he found himself, could always pull it together for the 35 seconds it took for the cop or school administrator to walk by, before degenerating back to the stumbling, poorly arranged mass of cells he had worked so hard to become.

Here's hoping my laptop can hold it together a while longer...

Dell - savior or Satan?

Dell doesn't send Windows software CDs with new systems

After my desperate, blogged complaint of my Dell laptop succumbing to the forces of entropy, I received an unexpected note from a Dell representative, advising me that I can contact Dell to get copies of the WinXP OS that I so badly need. Come to find out that the reason they'll happily send them to me is that they never sent them to me in the first place!

Oh yeah - apparently, it's policy. What the blazing Hell...? When you buy a new machine from a big, reputable name, you also buy the OS. How the bleeding Christ can you justify not sending the CDs with the new system?

Now, somewhere out there is a Dell guy surfing blog entries - it must be how he found the last one, and so-generously left me a helpful comment. And I appreciate that. When he finds this one, I would like to explain the previous, rabid paragraph thusly:

When I got near the lowest point a computer consumer ever hopes to get to, on the brink of total system failure, I reach for my magic bullet. During digital freefall, I reached for the ripcord on my silicon parachute, and I found absolutely nothing. I thrashed around the house like a blinded ape for two hours, racking both my brain and my evermore-cluttered home office, looking for software that just had to be there. Looking for software that I had never needed before, and so had never searched for before.

Reaching into the abyss and pulling back nothing, I was quite upset, and instantly deluded my guilty conscience that I must have misplaced the CD's that I lacked. Why, it must be the only answer, since it would be hideously unorthodox to not include them with a new machine. Only software pirates need fear this type of inconvenience/gripping terror - I paid for my shit! What is this, "Bargain Bob's Big Box Computer Warehouse??" No, no, certainly this must be my error in losing the disks, and what a fool I am to have put myself in such a position!

And so it was a relief but still jarring that I found I hadn't directly caused myself all that torture, but that it was provided to me by a wrong-headed corporate policy. Yeesh!

Your name isn't really Phillip, is it?

Following that revelation, I got to spend over 90 minutes on the phone with "Phillip," a very nice gentleman from east Asia who either due to language skills or lousy intercontinental phone connection took no less than five tries to collect EACH discreet piece of contact data. I had to spend several minutes stating, repeating and even describing ("no, there are five digits in my zip code...") my street name, telephone number, zip code, city name, e-mail address, etc. Frustrating for both of us, I'm sure, but shit, at least he was getting paid to do it.

Then he called me back to tell me he won't be sending me the CDs for the older Dimension system, because it's not under warranty. Madness! I rebuked his attempt to snatch away my just-won CD, and told him that they were never sent in the first place. After a brief discussion with his supervisor, he advised me he'd send them. I'll feel a lot more secure when they are actually in-hand.

So I must say thanks to Rick at Dell in Texas, for going the extra mile and clueing me into the fact that my OS CD's can be found somewhere, anywhere. That's just the kind of thing that keeps a customer loyal. And big, hairy bollocks to Dell for disincluding said CD's as a matter of course. That's just the sort of thing that scares customers away.