Odd Requests
I have begun to think that one of my purposes in life is to ask odd things of customer services representatives, and thereby provide entertainment for them. I don’t think that I’m any different than anyone else, or that I have particularly high expectations of people or companies. Maybe it’s just that I don’t mind looking like an idiot.
Example: I have a close friend who wants to open a bookstore at some stage in the future. It’s a long-term goal, but serious enough to deserve encouraging. So having thought about it for some time I decided on buying a book about opening a bookstore (ironic, I know, but just wait - it gets better). The logical thing - as far as i figured - was to go down to the bookstore and ask them if they had a book on opening a bookstore, but being a member of whatever generation it is that we belong to these days I let my fingers do the walking. Grabbing the yellow pages I turned to the bookstore section and started dialling (note that the irony hadn’t quite struck me yet):
Unsuspecting Salesperson:Hello [Name of Bookshop], how can I help you?
Me: Hi there, I was after a book about how to start or run a bookshop.
Salesperson (stifling a laugh):A what?
Me:A book on opening a bookshop.
Salesperson (after a fit of laughter): I’m sure I can tell you the answer to that one without even looking at the database. No. It just wouldn’t make any kinda sense now would it? It would be like KFC selling the recipe to their famous chicken.
Me: Hmmm, I never really thought about it like that…Thanks.
Salesperson (still stifling a laugh):No worries, good luck with that!
Suffice to say that after about the third or fourth of these calls I started to get a little down, and had to rely on other means.
Example 2: Today I spent about an hour wandering around Melbourne city trying to find a lid for my drink bottle. Stupid I (now) know, but I’m somewhat attached to this drink bottle, and have always thought it better to fix something than buy a new one. I didn’t think this a big ask, and it would have been incredibly straight forward if the store from which the bottle was originally bought hadn’t since gone under. I have since learned however that all different brands of metal drink bottles have different sized lids, with different pitch angles on the thread and all sorts of annoying things like that. But I did have the satisfaction of putting a condescending/pitying smile on several salespeople…where do I get these ideas?
February 5th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Did you call Tim’s Bookshop?
February 5th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m James. I take photos, use copious amounts of punctuation and occasionaly post here on Wills blog…
I like to think (in a somewhat narcassitic way) that some of the photos i have taken are worth keeping. Protecting, if you will so two weeks ago I spent $305 on a large lacie external hard disk.
Now I know that you can buy a hard disk and external enclosure for much less but I wanted something good, something that would protect my photos and other valuable data, So I dug deep and after reading rave reviews, spent the money.
you can see where this is going right…
Now after feverishly backing up my Hard disk I set about getting rid of some of the old stuff that I didn’t need to carry around everyday, In this way I “found” 25gb of space on my laptop.
Two weeks later and time for the weekly backup. Up pops an error message, Unable to read from disk Initialise/Ignore/Eject. f*ck was an understatement.
After 20 minutes trying to get this disk to mount (”load” for you non-mac sub humans) up pops nothing.
nothing, 320gb of plain nothing
no pictures,
no music,
no backups,
no documents,
nothing
and then it hit…
No gearbox…
Gone was the 1.5gb of data I had personally generated for that project. Its as if someone has cut that gearbox month out of the space time continum all I have left is the lingering taste of berroca and coffee…
As I sit here shellshocked the harddrive just looks back at me, the little blue eye blinking as it hapily reports that nothing is wrong, no corrupt file cause there are none to be corrupted.
just lots of nothing… and 300 dollars worth of harddisk I now don’t trust.
February 5th, 2007 at 10:49 pm
Pete, what in the Sam Hill are you on about?
macguyver, I think that deserves an upset call to the manufacturer! :-/ For those of you playing at home in different countries/unis than us, Gearbox is the assignment equivalent of hell…a sadomasochistic conglomeration of all that is ‘wonderful’ in the world of engineering. I feel your pain son.
(Random note, my laptop sounds like it’s about to take off, its fans are running at 6000rpm apparently. And apple spell checker doesn’t put a red dotted line underneath a lowercase i…shot apple!
)
February 5th, 2007 at 10:51 pm
did you install smc fan control? it may be set to 6000 minimum
February 5th, 2007 at 11:13 pm
lol Will, I’m assuming Sam Hill is some sort of substitute for hell or similar…..
Tim’s Bookshop is a bookshop in Kew and Canterbury which happens to be owned by my uncle. His name is quite predictably Tim
February 6th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
The phrase “what in the Sam Hill” comes from … something. Possibly Dr Who, but that might just be about that he had an assistant named Sam Hill. I know this because I hate Dr Who and had an ex who loved it.
Incidentally, one of my good friends name’s is Sam Hill. Really, genuinely. And she never had anyone mention the above to her until she was about 23.
February 7th, 2007 at 8:56 am
Try this,
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-sam1.htm
February 8th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Well Pete, you are on the money. It is a euphemism for Hell so far as I know. And major points for plugging your uncle’s bookshop. Random, but amusing also!
I’m still not entirely sure how Dr. Who comes into the whole picture, but maybe you were just venting Sandune?
February 8th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
Oh, and photos from Australia Day 2007 are up in the photo gallery
February 8th, 2007 at 9:29 pm
MacGuyver/James - first of all, a backup means you have a second “backup” copy of the data. It’s not a backup if your only copy is now on an external hard drive instead of on the laptop…… seems obvious, but needs to be said.
Secondly, if you used Linux instead of Mac, 1) chances are you wouldn’t have had the hard drive problem in the first place, but more seriously, 2) you would have had a pretty good chance of retreiving the data with something like MondoRescue or ddrescue. Maybe try and find a PC with Linux, and ideally someone who knows how to use it, and see if you can recover some/all of your data. This will most probably only work if you did nothing destructive to the hard drive after noticing that it ate your data. Although, simple things like formatting (but not writing new files to the disk) often don’t effect your ability to recover data. Using this method, I’ve been able to recover (some of the) data even from drives that have physically failed and report thousands of bad blocks. (Once I had to pull the platters out of a drive and put them into an identical drive to get my data back because the heads had crashed - nerve wracking…)
Having said all that, I have to admit to being a hypocrite. My backup policies are abysmal.
February 10th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
You poor thing James. It has happened to me, it’s a pretty damn painful experience.
And, back to the main topic at hand, I think the idea of owning a bookstore’s pretty awesome… How much fun would that be?! ;P