Tech support

When I went to college, my parents bought me a computer. It was (to me) a very nice laptop: big screen, a keypad, a trackpad that worked, fancy scrolling that didn't involve clicking, heavy but durable and highly functional. To somebody who knows nothing about computers, it was very nice. And compared to the dinosaur I had been using (inherited from my dad, which he had inherited from a friend, who supposedly had it new but that's not for sure, and probably manufactured when Nixon was president), it was a dream to work with.

It was sturdy. It survived my roommate spilling hot wax all over it, my carrying it to classes, getting dropped a few times, the battery falling out and cracking, and of course getting toted to and from home over breaks in my not-so-cushiony, worn-out, hand-me-down backpack that I was just too stubborn and lazy and cheap to replace.

That computer lasted me three years. The power cord shorted out on me over a school break two years in, but I bought a new one off of Amazon and kept trucking on. A little while later, my darling laptop decided that it was old and tired, so it began to overheat easily. I found ways to cope and moved on. That worked for a little while before new issues began to arise. The screen flickered. It would randomly shut itself off for no good reason. The battery lasted all of five seconds, so I had to keep it plugged in constantly, and I couldn't move it at all because if I did the battery was sure to fall out and/or the plug would lose connection because it was so loose. I could see that the end was nigh. Fortunately, it had the grace to wait until summer break to fully develop all of these horrible symptoms, so I had time to look for a new laptop without worrying that it would die and leave me stranded among piles of homework and no way to get it all done.

I eventually found one that I liked, hesitated about spending so much on a computer, read the reviews and talked to friends who all reassured me that it was a good choice, hesitated again, then bit the bullet and bought the thing, even spending extra on an extended warranty.

My old laptop went to my sister to use for schoolwork. She used it a few months before it gave up the ghost and died.

Turns out I needed that warranty. As magical and beautiful as my laptop is, it has decided to have issues. First the case broke. I got that fixed. Then the trackpad thought it would be fun to be difficult. I discovered that turning the machine off and then back on (hitting restart doesn't work; it has to be completely off) temporarily fixed the problem. And then yesterday my old enemy of technology problems decided to manifest itself in the form of a faulty power cord. I discovered, via a game of Twister with said power cord, that if I tuck it underneath my laptop just right, I can still get a charge.

But the last time that my cord went the way of the Twinkie, it did so within a matter of days and I do not intend to stick around to see if this cord can outmatch that. I called tech support.

The upside of owning a product of a large corporation is that you know right off the bat just how trustworthy they are, and whether or not the integrity of your product will live up to expectations and marketing.

The downside is that they are so large that they don't employ enough people to answer the phone.

They instead make use of automated responses that chatter messages at you like "your call may be monitored for quality purposes" which I think is a subtle way of saying "if you act like a complete jerk during this call, the entire internet will know about it thirty seconds from now", and "please hold, one of our representatives will be with you shortly"  by which of course they mean "we want to see just how desperate you are", alternately "we're trying to break the record for longest hold", and "for technical support, dial 1. For warranty services dial two. For your grandmother, press three. For none of these options, please stay on the line". By the end of  time that it took me to navigate the maze of  dial options, reach a person, find out that I was in the wrong department, get transferred, wait on hold again, listen to staticky elevator music interspersed with ads that I didn't want to hear because they didn't relate to me, and talk to the right person, I decided that I would have been better off pressing option five "for the shaman to pray over your machine and chase the demons from it, dial in a Latin chant and slaughter the firstborn lamb of your flock".

But then the nice person on the other side of the phone (who, as far as I can tell, was not a shaman), arranged for me to have my computer sent in so I can get the trackpad fixed (hopefully via non-spiritual methods, but I'm not being picky at this point), and get a replacement cord for my laptop. And all without satanic rituals or getting my phone call posted on the internet. That's something to be excited about.