Fire Duds

Longtime readers of the Sneed blog will recall that I have a longstanding love/hate relationship with the folks at Circuit City (CC). More hate than love. My most protracted and most famous skirmish with these lunkheads involved a Toshiba laptop that they sold me. It was in for repairs so many times that I finally badgered them into honoring their extended warranty by taking the piece of crap back. Unfortunately, rather than giving me a refund, I got a gift card for about $1100 bucks or something. Had I listened to the always savvy Kurt and sold the stupid card on Craig's list, I would bought a new computer at Best Buy or somewhere and would not being having to write another unflattering post about CC today. On January 17th of this year, my replacement laptop crapped out, leaving me high and dry. The following day I took it to the Firedog®, aka, Geeks in a Box, desk at my neighborhood CC in the hope that they would be able to do some magic geek stuff and get me back in business. No such luck. The tech on duty pronounced my mother board dead and told me that it would be away for service for 21 days or so. All under warranty, of course. I simply cannot survive without a laptop for three weeks, so I just bought me a new one. This also gave me a chance to prove to the children Sneed that the vicious lie they spread, that I wouldn't give a nickel to see an earthquake, is simple untrue. For a mere $99 the Firedog® kid copied my old hard drive to the new one. At least I had my data. I took my swell new laptop home and the boys at CC said that they were going to send the old one in for repair the next day. This morning as I was working in the yard, it dawned on me that I should check on the old laptop, so after lunch, I went over to CC. Predictably, we played a game of Laptop? We don't got no stinking laptop. After much hemming and hawing and searching "the computer", the poor joker on duty summoned another geek, a senior geek named Michael, who had perfected the art of dismissiveness. His attitude seemed to be that I was simply lying about the whole affair. In fact, he suggested that I needed to go home and get my receipt showing that they even took the old computer. I suppose that it should have occurred to me to bring the receipt, but it didn't. I told him that I would go home and get it, but that my attitude was going to worsen if I had to. Luckily, at that moment, geek one found the receipt in question. Here's the rub. The computer is still sitting where they put it a month ago. It seems that they forgot to send it in. This is all the fault of a guy named Chris and poor Chris is going to call me tomorrow to 'splain what happened. This wouldn't be such a big deal, but I need last year's Turbo Tax program which is on the old computer. I have my actual return stored on a flash drive but I can't open it without last year's software. Plus, Ican't remember where I put the original program for safekeeping. It's always something.

Firedog ® is a registered trademark of the Circuit City Corporation.

Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky