Bit of Ivory

We’ve worked hard all week, and everything we have left to do is dependent on other people coming through on their end, so things aren’t quite so rushed this morning. It looks like we’ll make our deadline, which is a lovely thing.

This means that I am at leisure to tell you the sad, sad story of Ginny, my faithful laptop. You will remember that she broke on the first of July, and we took her in for repairs on July 7. They were supposed to ship it to the VPR Matrix repair facility, who would then contact us with how much it would cost to fix her. The estimate was supposed to take about two weeks.

Well, two weeks later, we hadn’t heard from them, so Dad called Best Buy. They had sent her to the wrong place, which had sent her back to the store. One wonders how long she’d been there and when they were going to do something about it. Anyway, after apologizing, they said they were shipping her to the correct place the next day.

Feeling a bit anxious, I made Dad call a few days later just to confirm that she’d gotten there. After being bounced around between employees, he finally got someone who said they’d call the facility. They called back a bit later to say yes, they’d received her, and we’d be hearing from them in a few days.

We didn’t. More than two weeks later, now, I made Dad call again last night. No one at the store could find our anything about her. They even had trouble finding a record of having shipped her. Dad finally managed to get the number of a higher-up guy out of them. Scott turned out to be some kind of a regional manager. At first he couldn’t find anything either. He did a bit of exclaiming (“Why did they send it there?”), and had to spend a bit of time looking around. Finally he told Dad that he’d call him back. It took an hour, but he found Ginny.

She was sitting in a product return bin in a Best Buy store in Washington state.

I’m simply furious. The employees at Best Buy were not only incompetent, they *lied* to us. I doubt she ever made it to the repair facility.

Luckily, Scott is pretty mad, too. He said that if he hadn’t gone looking for her, Ginny might have been lost forever. He’s having Ginny shipped directly to him, to see what shape she’s in. He also told Dad that our local Best Buy store should replace her outright, with a brand-new computer. In any case, we certainly shouldn’t be charged for her repair.

I don’t know what will happen, though. At the moment, all I’m hoping is that among her adventures, Ginny didn’t come too close to any powerful magnets that erased her hard drive. I backed most stuff up, but there were a few things that I thought were saved in one file but that actually weren’t, and that I’d sorely miss.

Scott was going to call again at the end of today to give us an update. I’ll keep you posted, too.

In other news, though, there’s a great interview over on TLC of Edmund Kern, who wrote a book called The Wisdom of Harry Potter: What our favorite hero teaches us about moral choices. I ordered the book from Amazon today. Go. Read. Good stuff. (And most skillfully done by the wonderful .)

Also, I’ve gotten one of my coworkers and her two kids hooked on the Vorkosigan saga, and said coworker gave me the most adorable crocheted beret today.