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No Geek Squad in The Shire

September 4, 2006 By 2 Comments

I heard great things about Best Buy a couple years ago so I bought a laptop from them. It’s been a good machine up until a week ago when somehow Norton got corrupted and allowed cooties in the door. Problem with the Best Buy solution for me is that I live 150 miles from the nearest store. "Need a new battery? It’s free with your service plan, but you have to show up at the store. Computer dead? Bring it on in." Very handy if you live in town. Not so much if you don’t.

I brought it in Wednesday and I’m back today (to deliver my original recovery disks) with the promise that I’ll get it back in a couple of hours…with all my precious software wiped out (At least I have backups of all my data…whew!). Guess what I’ll be doing this week.

PaneraLife is full of compromises. If you want to live in the real-world equivalent of The Shire, you’ll have to travel to Isengard whenever you want a qualified techno-wiz to work on your computer.

So, Julie and I are waiting (and working, or at least blogging) in the free wi-fi zone at a Panera Bread shop in Fort Collins, Colorado while the geeks down the street re-install my operating system. THANK YOU PANERA, for the free wi-fi. It makes the trip to Isengard and the wait a bit more bearable.

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  • http://aboutthebrand.blogspot.com/ Kenyatta Lovett

    There are a great deal of problems associated with systemized computer repair. For one, to make money, you have to generalize everyone’s problems into a handful of categories, which doesn’t really work when you are dealing with the general public as a customer base. The other major problem focuses on the staff. The staff have been trained to deal with every customer as though they know nothing about computers, which can be annoying to users with a high level of computer competency.

    In all, the business model for systemized computer repair creates an incentive for users to purchase a new machine, rather than have their existing CPU repaired. If the car industry worked that way, we would all be in bad shape.

  • http://www.blog.marketmou.com Patricia Skinner

    Just reading about your laptop problems drove my blood pressure up Dave. In ten years I’ve had three or four crashes where I lost info. Hopefully that will never happen again (I now have a memory stick).

    The trouble with the information age is that we rely so heavily on these little electronic boxes we call laptops. Living so far out of town would certainly compound the problem. Hope this is all a thing of past and your problems are solved Dave!

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