Thursday – 08 November 2007
Another NBN Thursday draws to a close. Work was good. Today was “Sushi Wednesday.” (Yes, I know it was Thursday. Deal with it.) I picked up this week’s four-color goodness. And, I have brand-spankin-new sexy black hotness.

Human of the Day
There are actually three HotDs today: Joanne, from the laundry where I get my clothes done and Jerry and an unnamed manager at the Apple Store.

I decided to kill two avians with a single piece of silicate tonight and get my laundry done while I was exchanging my MacBook. (Sidenote: One of the Coworker Daves, misheard Code Monkey and me talking about the laptop and thought that we had referred to it as my BlacBook. That amused me.) So, off I went in search of adventure to swap my BlacBook MacBook and to get some clean drawers…

  • Joanne: I got to the laundry a little later than planned, but was still hopeful that I could get same-day service. Couldn’t hurt to ask, after all. So, I walked in… got up to the counter… and posed the question. Joanne looked at the clock, thought about it and said yes. When I went back later to pick up the clothes, she said that she basically did it because I’ve been a fairly regular customer and that she knew that if I said I needed them tonight, that I’d be back for them. (Truth be told, Joanne has consistently been the easiest-to-deal with person at that laundry in all of the time that I have been going there; I think I actually sigh in relief whenever I see that she’s working.)
  • Jerry and the unnamed Apple Store manager: While waiting on the laundry, I took the old and busted MacBook to the Apple Store to trade it in for new hotness. An associate named Jerry came up to help me. Bang. Zoom. I summarized last night’s call to the store and told him with whom I had spoken. He said that he could take care of it; he took the receipt and the MacBook and headed to the Genius Bar. A couple of minutes later, he came back – he needed my password to get into the system. And then, he was off again. He returned with the old MacBook and a fresh-in-the-box new one.There was a slight problem in matching the receipt to the MacBook – there had been some arcane workings in getting proper credit applied when the purchase was made. Enter: Unnamed manager. She came over, sussed out the deal and got the proper ducks in a row. A few minutes later, Jerry returned and told me how much it would cost to complete the exchange.

    Cost? Huh…wha?!?

    When I called last night, that was one of the things that I specifically asked. The associate said that his manager had authorized a waiving of any restocking fee. Jerry disappeared again. While he and Managerette were trying to hammer out the particulars, I wandered about the store. I also made a discovery: Battlefield 2142 has been ported to the Mac. I wandered back to the front of the store, just as they were trying to figure out where another discount had been taken in purchasing the old MacBook. I tried, unsuccessfully to call (who picked up the MacBook for me) to help sort things out. But, Managerette came up with a solution and… no more than three minutes after that, I was walking out the door with the new system.

Stray Toasters

Namaste.