i kill you filthy

(this blogpost is dedicated to all my friends at Hewlett Packard technical support.)

ahem. the story of a billion idiots, including me:

on the 15th, i purchased a new laptop from circuit city (they had a sale). it's an HP dv5220us -- pretty nice machine, good screen, big drive, lots of RAM, some nice bells and whistles, a 14 day return policy, a year of hp service/warranty, and a bunch of really crappy software that needed to be uninstalled.

das coo'. i live for that stuff. and i did. for about a week i uninstalled, reinstalled, tweaked, modified, configured and generally made this machine my own. i transferred all my data off of my old desktop, wiped it, and sold it. i put all my data on the laptop.

i woke up on monday to begin the backing up process.

my new computer coughed weakly, looked blue, and died. the bios HDD test failed in sector 1 - 7. for those of you who don't speak geek, that means: no booting. no love. here lies hp dv5220us.

hah hah. very funny, right? just when i was going to back it up, it croaks! bastard must have seen me coming.

this makes me feel like a scallion; green and unkind to digestive processes. i call HP, wait through their irritating phone tree, get a dude on the line. he agrees with my assessment: dead hard drive. they'll send me a new one scheduled to arrive the 27th. that's today. why it will take them four days, i'm too flustered to ask. i'm pretty much just happy they don't argue about the proved mortality of the drive.

then i realize i've only begun.

i look into salvaging the 50gb of N'Sync videos that exists on the dead drive but nowhere else. it's my whole collection! i get on the wife's laptop and do the internet chat with the HP support crew -- they're all named "Linda" and "Rachel" even though they are quite clearly actually named "Samil" and "Rajeesh." i guess it's harder to get furious at Rachel? one wonders.

i sit through their canned responses to the questions i didn't ask. i wait until they actually bother to read the questions i am asking. i learn that, as i suspect, there is a good chance my data remains unharmed -- the bad sector is one crucial to the OS but not one that affects the data. i am told HP cannot pay for assisting with data retrieval, but "Rachel" helpfully sends me links to $20 cable connectors i can use to plug the bad drive into a USB port and access it.

das coo'.

i walk on down to the local computer dude and buy the thingy that Rachel recommended. when i get it home, however, i discover Rachel neglected to know what kind of drive i have -- it's a SATA drive, not the normal ATA drive. what else does Rachel neglect to know? everything it seems.

things get worserer.

i return the useless thing and see if they have what i DO need. nope. i hit radio shack across the street but no love. i take the bus downtown and walk through the tenderest loin (two arrests, eighteen junkies, three piles of vomit) to CompUSA where i spend half an hour trying to find a salesperson. when i request a device to port my 2.5" SATA drive to USB they make that "you talka crazy" face.

they make that face, surprisingly, because they don't know what i'm talking about not because i don't know what i'm talking about. it turns out that they just started making 2.5" SATA drives and no one sells stuff for them.

this is just what i want to hear. thanks for the warning HP!

i decide it's time to stop fucking around so i bolt for central computer. it's a real computer store, with people who build computers for a living and actual hardware. there, things also look grim. i ask for something to connect a 2.5" SATA drive to USB and hear, "no have." but the guy who's helping me is a groovy frood and he opens up a case for a 3.5" SATA drive and compares the connectors to the pins on a 2.5" SATA drive -- he can do this as i've cleverly taken a digipic of my bad drive and brought it with me. it looks the same! i can probably use a 3.5" case and it will be wonky, but it will work. we think. maybe. he says bring in the drive tomorrow and i can try it out!

thank you tony!

'course it's now 5:30 and i've spent all day working on this and i'm supposed to meet my sister at 6:30 in sausalito and my tension level is running at near-doom levels. i feel like someone has hit me in between the shoulders with a baseball bat. someone riding a horse and holding the bat like a jousting pole.

i take a cab home absolutely befucked. and hell if i'm walking through the loin again.

that night i poke around on-line and find some guy selling what i need for $20. his business, TEKGEMS, is conveniently in the mission and he says no sweat, come on down tomorrow and pick it up. praise the lord! the right thing! the right price!

on tuesday i go down to TEKGEMS and the dude there is all cool and he lets me check out my drive in his warehouse/office and whaddya know! my data is all there! i give him the cash and heartily recommend his services. he could use the business, methinks.

i get home. i plug my drive into bartlebee's laptop. i go to access my data -- whaddya know! another problem! i had a windows password on the drive and it won't let me open my data folders! it's "not accessible" says the happy little error screen.

again i chat with the super helpful HP technical support folks. "Susan" tells me what to do, but is reassuringly completely incorrect. after answering a bunch of questions i didn't ask and suggesting that the problem probably was that all my data was lost and i should give up hope, Susan tells me to try something i tried twice already and then disconnects me.

thank you HP technical support! at least they're sending me a replacement drive.

luckily, i'm geeky enough to find a solution to my problem in the microsoft knowledge base. it works! i access the data, transfer the irreplacable stuff onto bartlebee's laptop and hope i can get the movies and music (uh. i mean the N'Sync videos) off onto the new drive when it arrives. it arrives today, remember?

i call in to check after looking at my online support page. it still says the drive hasn't shipped. "don't worry sir, you should have it on the 27th," chirp the heavily accented gentlemen who assist me.

yesterday i call again. "yes," i am told, "it will arrive tomorrow." i point out that it is already the afternoon of the 26th and if it hasn't shipped yet, it will have trouble arriving on time. i mention that i am leaving the country. that if they miss me, i will have a useless computer and a sharp ax.

i am told that sometimes shipments don't get updated until after 5:30 and perhaps it has shipped? also there is a small back order issue and that is why it has taken so long in the first place. i should check on-line again after 5:30.

i do so. surprisingly, there is no shipment notification. i attempt to forget the entire disaster by drinking most of a six pack with horsefucker and ali. it helps. they are full of the funny.

today i call again. i am told that my drive will be arriving on the 27th. i point out that it is the 27th. the helpful HP support person says, "aha! then your drive will arrive today!" and tries to hang up. i point out that it is a logistical impossibility for my drive to arrive before it is shipped. i refuse to get off the phone until i get a tracking number, threaten to return the laptop, and to burn down the building. my seventh useless HP support technician throws in the towel.

he bumps me up to the supervisor, brandon.

brandon is american. he does not offer helpful suggestions to issues i do not have, extend boiler plate information that concerns no one, or insist (as actually happened with HP tech #5) that i am my mother. instead, he tells me something very interesting:

there is no drive being shipped.

there is no drive being shipped because they do not have any. they will not have any until mid-august, long after i've left for new zealand.

i now know why they moved those technical support groups to india. it's so by the time you got there with an explosive device you will have cooled down a little and consider sparing the supervisors.

brandon was very helpful in an extremely unhelpful way. he offered to ship me the drive in mid-august, but not actually to me in new zealand. someone else would have to forward it to me from america. he offered to, uh, wait... i'm sure he must have offered something?

no. not a fucking thing. not even an apology for the consistent lying and bullshit and useless crap i got from every single HP tech support person who works for him. i asked if they could ship me whatever drive they had in stock? no. could they ship me a new machine? no.

i asked brandon where i could send a letter of complaint and he said that, actually, wherever i sent it the letter would just end up on his desk. clever, that.

then he told me to have a nice day.

can you believe that? "no, we can't help you fix the problem we caused. we won't offer you any sort of perk or swag to assuage the trauma. we won't even apologize for selling you a lemon, leaving you high and dry and totally fucking up your weekend. but have a nice day."

today is day 13 of my 14 day circuit city return period. instead of driving down to big sur to camp out with my gorgeous wife, i gathered up my dead laptop and my new cables and walked back into circuit city.

they were cool. they let me trade in my lemon for a new machine and they let me set up at one of their desks for an hour to transfer all my stuff off the bad drive onto the new drive witout paying their support fees.

so once again i have a brand new hp laptop. i need to uninstall and reinstall and configure and tweak and customize.

but first i need to back all my shit up. and see if i can make my back flex in a more convincing manner after a truly miserable week.