Ponytails & Laptops

“I want a copy of all of the papers and get me a manager,” the lady demanded. She looked like an aging prairie wife. She was stout, big chested, and wore her white hair in a big ponytail. The Geeksquad girl slunk into the back room and left me alone with ponytail.

“This is ridiculous,” she said, “ I’ve worked I.T. for over twenty years and they are trying to tell me about computers.” I gave her shy stupid smile that she probably thought was sympathetic.

I avoided ponytail’s ticked-the-hell-off face and tried to imagine the computers she used to work on. Twenty years in I.T.? Really? I imagined her with a blond ponytail wearing the same flannel button down, hulking over a huge clunky monitor somewhere in Dallas. If you wear that much flannel you belong in Dallas.

The Geeksquad girl came back and indicated ponytail to the manager like she was the alligator in the backyard pool. I offered Geeksquad girl my lap top, now dead, and detailed its maintenance history.

Ponytail had taken the bitch-route with her and it hadn’t gone too well so I played the victim: This is the 7th or 8th time I’ve brought this computer in. I don’t understand why it won’t work. I’m a senior at UM and I have my notes on that thing and my grad school applications. Oh my god I’m going to lose my grad school applications… I’m a graphic designer too and need a working computer. That’s how I earn my money. I’m out of the job every time I bring this in. I’m losing my papers and my designs, oh and my keyboard keys keep falling off. It’s like scrabble and I can’t take it. Oh why won’t it just stay fixed? Scrabble isn’t that fun. I don’t have time for this…

I refrained from adding a “woe is me” but it was implicit.

The Geeksquad girl looked up the past work orders for my computer. It had been worked on about eight times this year and had three hard drive replacements. The AC unit on the computer was broken for half of the work orders but they had misdiagnosed it every time.

Ponytail was still hissing at the manager, a tall black man who kept grunting and occasionally saying “I see, I see.”

Geeksquad girl told me that I was eligible for a new computer due to the ‘no lemon’ policy in my warranty. She had to ship it out to Gateway first. She would ask them to junk out my computer and then Gateway would refund Big Box for the computer. That refund would give me store credit towards a new computer.

It would take ‘about’ ten business days. They’d call me.

When I left the Geeksquad counter Ponytail was ranting about dual memory disks, “I know about computers. I’ve been doing this for two decades. Hell, I could have done this myself but,…”

I went to the laptop section to see what I would have to choose from in ‘ten business days.’ My laptop was $1399. I could get something decent for that right? Well, I happened to be right and then some. I walked through the isles about three times with a huge shit-eating grin like the benefactor of some gross accounting error. All of the laptops had at least twice the RAM and diskspace of my deceased Gateway, and they were all about $800 except for the gaudiest Vaio and MacBook.

So, any suggestions?