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yet another Kafkaesque Fry's Electronics experience
Saturday, May 15 1999
Kim's been complaining about her laptop computer and how slow it runs, and I've been suggesting she go buy some memory for it. So today we planned to go to the well-known electronic Hell on Earth, Fry's electronics. I figured that the proper memory would be difficult to find in most smaller places. Additionally, Kim was in search of a device called an "AlphaSmart," a sort of super-stripped-down laptop with a tiny screen and no mechanical storage. Data composed on an AlphaSmart is transferred to a desktop computer via a serial cable. Though the target audience for the AlphaSmart is school children, handicapped adults and other "special people," Kim has fond memories of writing on an AlphaSmart back when she was a teacher at Town School in San Francisco, where all students were required to have them. It was a much more convenient writing tool than either a laptop or a Palm Pilot, and its batteries last much longer too.
It was the usual mad Saturday crowd at Fry's. Just the hot dog line in front of the building was intimidating. We didn't find any AlphaSmarts, unfortunately, but we did get what was claimed to be 64 Megs of memory suitable for a CTX EZbook 700. This is where I made a serious mistake. I had a few seconds to examine the part sealed away in its semi-translucent silvered space bag, and since, - from the overall heft and the little I could see - it looked about right, I didn't bother to compare it with the working memory cards I'd actually brought along from Kim's machine; the whole ambiance of Fry's is such that comparisons of this sort (and, indeed, any interruption) is strongly discouraged. Besides, as illogical as this sounds, I think I was figuring that my luck with Fry's stuff has been so uniformly bad that now, at last, my luck had to be changing for the better. I even joked with Kim as we walked past the woeful teeth gnashers in the endless "returns" lines, "Hey, we could always stand in that line." But out in the parking lot when I laid the cards side by side in my hands, I could see there was no way that the new one would ever fit in the socket occupied by the older ones. The connector density on the new memory card was about twice that of the old, and it was about a third longer as well. Argh! From all appearances, yet another Kafkaesque Fry's experience was on the brew.
Back inside the evil Deathstar, we were told that our only option was to go through the returns line and then try again to get the correct part. So, like the dutiful consumers Fry's wants us to be, we went and stood in that dreadful line. It made absolutely no forward progress during the ten minutes we stood there. I ran around back to the checkout boys and showed them their fuck up, hoping they could bypass the requirement to go through the dreaded returns process. No such luck. So I told Kim we should just get the fuck out of there and come back some other time.
We tried to find the memory at another store a mile or so away, but they didn't have it. In summary, then, after all of the ordeal of our Fry's experience, we'd gained nothing but yet another appointment to go through it all again. If I ever hear about a disgruntled cheerleader going crazy and crashing a Cessna full of plastique into a Fry's, I won't be among those inquiring into how many hours of videogames she played.
I've been taking advantage of the high-bandwidth connection at work to download MP3 audio from the internet. Yesterday I brought a harvest of obscure Guided by Voices stuff home on a ZIP disk. An album's worth came to only about 20 Megs of disk space. The song I especially enjoy right now is "Fun City Girls" from the Japanese release of Mag Earwig.
Generous samples rising in the Indian Heaven.
Doesn't pretend she even cares, things change at eleven.
She's running off with the fun city girls.
She's running off with the fun city girls.
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