Posse Up

As of 3:37 pm CST, I'm officially putting a posse together. The goals of this posse will be to march upon Best Buy on the east side of Madison and level the building and its inhabitants using any and all forms of weaponry and other destructive equipment. While we will leave the building in a heap of smoldering ash stained with the blood of its employees generally, we will particularly target the so-called "Geek Squad," for their repeated atrocities against mankind, meaning me.

For those of you already preparing your arsenals and applying the warpaint, and who do not require a deliniation of these crimes, you can stop reading now, and continue about your business. For the rest of you, let me break it down like this: I have already mentioned what happened with my old laptop, the cd drive, and the replacement computer they gave me. I was understandably perturbed at the fact that a fair portion of my data had been lost when they simply chose to replace my computer without informing me and destroying the old one, but I felt the benefits of a new computer outweighed anything I may have lost. So, on that day I foolishly decided to show mercy upon Best Buy, and signed an armistice with them, agreeing not to unleash the Mongol hordes. I had thought their treachery at an end.

However, I was mistaken. I received a call one week later informing me that my old hard drive had been recovered, and that I could have the data backed up. I authorized him to go ahead and back it up, charge me for it, and send it back. A few days later I went to the store to pick up what they had sent back. It was not, as I expected, the backup discs, but rather the hard drive itself. Okay, thanks, but what the hell was I supposed to do with it - plug it into my ass and burn my own backup discs? So I gave it back, asked them to back it up, and charged $160 to my credit card. I returned the next day to receive the discs. I took the discs home, put them into my computer, and discovered that all of the files were in some extension I couldn't open. Again, less than helpful. They used a compression program, which I understand, because that was a shitload of data. My problem was they failed to tell me this, and gave me the finished product in a format there was no way for me to use. I tried everything I could to open them, including downloading some program purporting to handle those files. Of course, the program was in German. My Nazi dialects not being what they used to, I was spurned again.

So I went back to Best Buy the next day, asking for them to back up my data in a way that would let me access it. No problem, says they. I leave for Oshkosh, and return the next day. This is four trips in four days, mind you. I pick up the discs they have for me. Guy wants to charge me another $160; had he not conferred with another geek whom I'd dealt with in one of my previous thousand trips, he would have felt the full weight of a skull-crushing cockslap across his bitch-ass mouth, and then nothing at all. Having avoided this inconvenience, I retrieved my discs without further incident and returned home. On the way out, the guy said "Have a nice day," or something similar. I turned to Kristin and quipped "See you tomorrow."

Which brings me to 3:30 pm CST today. I insert the discs into my computer. Same file extensions. Same inability to open the files. And guess what? SAME EXACT DISCS. Now, maybe it was my naivete in taking what they gave me and assuming any level of basic competence - - maybe I should have opened it up and checked everything out for myself before taking it home. But I chose to place the blame on their shoulders for being incompetent beyond all possible belief, rather than me for not simply taking their incompetence for granted and complaining before I knew there was a problem. But, sure enough, about the only thing these discs are capable of doing is informing me that they were created on Thursday night, the 21st, instead of any day this weekend.

Thus we arrive at tonight's bit of raping and pillaging. Anyone who's down, gather your war hammers, morningstars, shoulder-mounted missiles, and jagged sporks, and meet me in the parking lot of the east side Best Buy. Show up late, and all you'll find is the mushroom cloud.