The Snow Leopard and I

My client Gladys, an elderly and very articulate lady in her seventies was pacing up and down in my office becoming increasingly irritated. Meanwhile fast approaching panic I was a fumbling of thumbs trying to get some images loaded onto a CD for her.

This was roughly two and a half years ago. My creaking Dell Dimension running under XP was slowly giving up the ghost. At that precise moment Bill Gates had decided to download the 595438 updates that were required daily just to keep XP functioning and for good measure my Norton Utilities had decided to remotely conduct a virus scan on the whole of North America. Added to which my CD drive – that most unreliable of technologies seemed incapable of writing anything to disk without an error. All I could do was helplessly watch.

I contemplated pulling the plug and rebooting, but as XP was taking 15 mins to boot and all the processes would just pick up where they left off it seemed pointless.

‘I can’t wait any longer,’ my client informed me in an exasperated manner. ‘You’ll have to deliver the images to me. I need them by three o’clock.’ I groaned inwardly. She lived half and hour away which meant that I’d just lost another hour out of my day.

Gladys paused by the door. ‘Saffron if you are going to stay in business, you really must get yourself a serious computer. Get an Apple.’ With that she was gone.

I was almost reduced to tears. I sat and watched my PC churn away in the mindless way that it always does and wondered why I the owner never had any control over the blasted thing.

Half an hour later the mindless churning had subsided and after numerous requests to shut the window, reboot and stand on one leg I was temporarily back in control.

I thought about Gladys’s advice, but decided I knew better. After all the only people who used Apple computers were geeks and the kind of people that the Russians in the Soviet era used to send to Siberia

I went on the internet, talked to my friend Cat the computer guru (who infuriatingly builds her own computers) and after twenty minutes I had an idea what I needed. I checked my bank balance and winced and then plucking up courage picked up the phone.

Twenty minutes later, after repeated requests to press bewildering combinations of buttons, and having endured long bouts of ghastly canned music I was on the Indian sub continent trying to purchase my next Dell computer. I knew exactly what I wanted, I had Cat’s list in front of me, the latest quad-processor, 4GB of RAM, an enormous hard drive, wide-screen monitor, card reader, two years fix it in your home warranty and support etc. The person I was talking to, whose English was extremely limited and was clearly working off a list of pre-formatted questions was however far more interested in selling me a whole raft of upgrades.

‘What will you be running on this machine?’ he enquired solicitously.

Knowing full well what his game was I replied tongue in cheek: ‘Notepad!’

He never flinched. ‘We always recommend 8GB of RAM for those kind of applications. Are you sure you will have sufficient memory?’

‘Quite sure! On second thoughts I think I’ll downgrade to 2GB of RAM I replied. He panicked and as there was no clear rejoinder on his script, we agreed to compromise on the original 4GB.

I hastily tried to tie up all the loose ends knowing that with Dell you can never get to speak to same person again and of course they can only receive calls, never call out. ‘How long will delivery take?’ I asked.

‘It will be with you in a matter of days,’ he replied confidently.

Ten minutes later I received confirmation of my order by e-mail. Delivery will take thirty ‘working’ days, it smugly announced.

I know in the new accountancy driven world nobody wants to keep vast stocks of product like they once did, but seriously did thirty working days really constitute ‘just in time?’

Despite this inauspicious start I slept well that night secure in the knowledge I would soon have a state of the art computer, which would process any task I threw at it with consummate ease……

(to be continued.)