How Did I Get Here?

Friday

I should have known it would catch up with me. I woke up this morning feeling really bad. So bad, in fact, that going into work seemed a bridge too far.

Nothing much was going on, I had caught up with most of my work, and it was Friday. No one would fault me for staying in bed all day and suffering quietly. So that’s about what I did.

Well, I did manage to wander over to the computer between fits of unconsciousness and my main goal was to fulfill a promise I made my son at Christmas time. It involved dropping about a grand for a new laptop.

The idea was this: he would kick in some of his Christmas gift money and some of his birthday cash and I would buy him a laptop. Not exactly his but a family laptop that he would use most of the time.

You see, we need a laptop and he needed a new computer. Steph also needed a computer so she would get his old one, I would get him a new laptop, and we could all use it on occasion for vacations or even nabbing it and wandering around the house using the wireless network.

Everybody wins. Except my wallet.

You always hear about this “$500 computer.”

Yeah, no that doesn’t happen. Only if you want some crappy piece of shit that runs slower than a sloth on Valium. I had to accept that I needed to drop nearly double that for the boy simply because he deserved something better than what he had and something that would be useful for years to come.

I went on the Dell website and built a pretty good Inspiron E1505. I bumped up the RAM to a whopping 2 gig which happens to be the same amount I have in Dellzilla. I also upgraded the hard drive to 120 GB, knowing the boy does a lot of graphic artistry and would be storing a lot of work. The Photoshop work also dictated I should get the better video card so I upgraded that too. The processor was 1.73 which is a bit pale compared to Delzilla (3.0 GHz, yeah baby) but pretty good for a laptop. Plus it was dual core so that helps.

I was a bit skittish about Vista simply because it’s so new. I wanted to get Windows XP and wait until they worked out the bugs in Vista before hitting up my good friend at Microsoft for a …. deeply discounted (free) version. But Dell said they couldn’t ship it with anything but Vista. Gotta love corporate tie-ins. OK, so I’m getting Vista. My main worry was because I get my antivirus free from DoD and they don’t have the Vista version yet so I will be without AV software which makes me a bit nervous. But I figure I’ll go with a free offering from AVG or something.

I stripped down a bunch of crap (bundled software, extended warranty) but added in a docking station so we could go mobile with it more easily and not have to worry about all the wiring.

The final price came to about $1400 which the missus about had a coronary over but I told her I had not started the haggling process. If you remember, I’m a master at this and the fight was about to begin. I strapped on my debate armor and went to work.

The first thing I did was do a search online for discount codes. I didn’t put much faith in this because, you know, it’s the Internet. I did a quick search and of course I got way too many hits to be helpful. A veritable overload of information and the vast majority of being useless so the useful ones get buried. I ended up finding this.

And it said it offered 20% off the laptop I was considering. I copied the code which looks like a nuclear launch sequence authorization code for some reason and put it in the coupon box at Dell.

BAM, 20% came right off.

What? That easy? Since when?

OK, now I took a screenshot of this just so I wouldn’t lose it somehow and called Dell.

The history of me dealing with Dell is well-documented. The latest round, I have to admit, caused me to delay this process of buying the laptop. I had found the number to their military discount section but they had banking hours and I’ve been too busy during the day to deal with them.

Today, I made some progress with them and come to find out, they couldn’t match the 20% off which was NOT stackable (meaning they can add other discounts to it). The lady thought she could and was trying before putting me on hold and hanging up on me.

Beef #1: why do they have to rebuild your entire machine themselves before rooting around for discounts? I mean, it’s THEIR online system and they can see my cart. Why then do we have to go through the rebuilding process? Idiots!

When she finally did this, she got me under $1000 and just beat the discount. I made her go over every item to make sure she had everything and sure enough, she left off the docking station which pumped up the price over what I could get on my own through the website.

Beef #2: she put me on hold to see how she could fix this and then after 5 minutes, the phone hung up.

Needless to say, I was pissed. But I had her name, her email, and her number. I figured she would call back. While I was waiting, I sent her two emails telling her to call me back and gave her my numbers. After a few hours when I got good and pissed off, I called back only to be told she was helping another customer.

(If you would like, you can drop her an email to express to her her dumbass ways. I’m just sayin’…. marisa_farahmand@dell.com.)

But this new guy was very sorry for my experience and would be happy to help me. Pissed off, I had to re-explain everything that had happened up to this point. I was not a happy camper but when am I ever when I do these things?

Two positive things came to light: first, this guy sounded American. If you don’t know, they outsource a lot of their support to Third World countries so you get to deal with some guy who hardly speaks the language and worse yet, off an annoying script and that you can barely hear. They also TRY to train them to sound American with a new name and all. Normally “Bill,” “Christopher” or the American like. Be that as it may, this guy sounded as American as indoor plumbing and spoiled celebrity hounding.

Second, I had a clearer line. My home phone sucks donkey ass so add in the bad connection and bad English and you get a very annoying experience. But this guy was coming through crystal clear so it made it a lot easier.

After some haggling, I got the system under $1000 again but with the tax, it came out just a little over.

Not bad for a $1400 machine (I know, … that is out of date before they even finish building it but it’s better than 90% of computers out there so suck it.)

So I dropped the duckies and now the wait begins. A week and the boy will be hooked up.

Now I’m going back to laying down. Being sick sucks, if you didn’t know, but it makes it better that I knocked out something I’ve been meaning to do for months.

Free Advice for Today: “When you have a choice of two exciting things, choose the one you haven’t tried.”

This entry was posted on Friday, February 9th, 2007 at 2:03 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.