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Let This Be a Lesson to Me

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Written by Thom Ring

All this talk about doing business with small shops in the community and dealing with the owner of the business who’s the person actually providing the product or service and being able to look that person in the eye and getting what you want because of the personal commitment to be found there...

And then I go and buy a computer from Sears.

Let it be a lesson to me.

All I wanted to do was put something on my Sears Charge. It’s the only charge-card I own, and I hardly use it. I keep it so I have some recourse if we need some appliance or something in an emergency and don’t have the cash to cough up. But I’d paid off the new washing machine, and hearing all about maintaining my credit and all I figured I needed something on it or they were going to tell me to go away. And I’d decided that with my new gig for Roadside a computer a little more modern than my current steam-driven unit might be a good idea.

There were opportunities to consider the folly of my actions. First, I was informed at the local Sears store that computers could only be purchased online. I’m not particularly fond of doing business online. It’s the antithesis of the mom-n-pop experience, for sure. But - hey - there was that credit card thing. They’d already tried to convert it to a Visa card. I didn’t want a Visa card.

Anyway, I went online and found a computer that sounded like it would do the trick for me, one with Windows 7, which gave me a chance to feel smugly up to date. I placed the order with my Sears card. Thus came my second opportunity to reconsider. They e-mailed an acknowledgment and a thank-you for the order. And then days later I received a notice that my choice wasn’t in stock (It flabbergasts me that in the digital age it’s so often the case that the information online can be more obsolete than what you might get from an old magazine or mail-order catalog. But that’s a lament for another day.).

I plodded ahead, finally got an order placed, and saw UPS deliver my unit a week or so later. More problems. I hadn’t noticed that the computer I’d purchased had no floppy-drive. I’ve got trays of floppies with years’ worth of stories, articles and photos to which I still refer from time to time. No big deal, as I still had my old unit and figured I could just transfer what I might need to a CD. Then the old beast crashed.

Oh well, I figured I’d deal with that problem when I had to face it. I blithely installed my favorite word-processing program, WordPerfect, and began work on my next contribution to Mom ‘N Pop Culture. And froze my new computer when I tried to save it. I didn’t let that stop me. I figured out a convoluted way to save the document, one that required me to move it to my wife’s computer, utter a lamentation in Latin and burn sage over my flash-drive. Still, I remained essentially oblivious to my own stupidity.

Now the problem became one of getting online. I contacted Belkin to learn how I could use their wireless remote, which sat in my wife’s office and thus smelled of sage. After a couple of weeks on hold, I was told in broken English what "cable adapter" I needed to connect to the internet. I bought the one specified at an area big-box electronics store, where the staff was incredibly polite and accommodating, even as they were no help at all. Finally they found some geek to help me, a defacto one, not one of those uniformed cartoon-characters proud to answer to the title.

I went home, hooked up the adaptor, and enjoyed high-speed internet connectivity - for three days. Then the computer started giving me messages that the adapter wasn’t connected. I fiddled with it while I burned. Finally it was another call to Belkin, where, after being stranded in my office for a month or so (What’s a "cordless phone?") I was told that the adapter would not work because it was not recognized by Windows 7. The three days of successful internet capability? That was a mystery to everyone.

The first person I talked to this time insisted Belkin had no adapters that would work with Windows 7. Then she hung up on me. A second call, during which I read David Copperfield, War & Peace and the entire works of Tolkien (Just kidding. I hate Tolkien) led me to an adapter that would work. I went back to the store, made the exchange, came home and enjoyed high-speed internet connectivity - for two weeks.

I completed the Belkin trilogy by being informed that the problem was with the software, uploading (Ooh -techspeak) a new program and then learning the IP address was wrong. After correcting that, the diagnosis was that the problem was with the computer itself.

I’ll say. I meanwhile had purchased a new word-processing program (Remember when Windows came with Word?) Which worked perfectly except that the thing simply would not communicate with my printer. And the computer would not recognize the printer-software.

Now it won’t have to. It’s already been shipped back to the California company that has the contract with Sears. My wife Jan recommended a guy with a small local computer shop who’d provided an internship to one of the people with whom she works doing job-development. Simply put, he was a nice guy. Right now, he’s putting a computer together to my specs; Windows XP Pro, PS-2 connectors for mouse and keyboard, floppy-drive, and a steam boiler just to make me feel at home. I didn’t even have to buy a keyboard, mouse or monitor, which was nice. I’ve got four of each already (Oh! But they’re not black!).

I don’t have it yet, so I’m reserving judgement. But hey. I met the guy who’s building my computer. I shook his hand. He’s doing what I asked. He personally will stand behind his work. He actually is building a computer for me.

What a concept. I should do this more often. And cut my Sears card into little pieces.