the saga continues.

after discovering that my ibook was returned with new hardware that wouldn’t run on anything but 10.3, i had apple send me install disks, which they said would take four or five business days to deliver; so i also decided to have my old panther install disks shipped overnight from chicago to ensure that i wouldn’t have to suffer through a long weekend with a hobbled system. after an not-so-amusing series of mishaps with fedex, i finally get my hands on the old disks late in the day. as i start the install process, i can see that it’s not working. my monitor is still on the fritz and i’m left wondering what i’ve done to so anger the computing gods.

after an hour on the phone with apple, i find out that the new motherboard is incompatible with all older retail panther disks and that you can only use the special ones that they forgot to send me earlier in the week. nobody can tell me why i didn’t get the disks in the first place, nor why the techs didn’t tell me that my old disks wouldn’t work before i had them shipped from chicago. so, i decide to ask for the only piece of concrete information that i think of that could give me an idea of when i’d get the disks. a simple tracking number.

after fumbling through various support menus for twenty minutes, the tech gives up and says that he can’t seem to get me a tracking number. so this is what it’s come to – i can’t even get a tracking number to verify that they’ve even shipped the disks. at this point i’ve had enough and ask to talk to his manager. i let him know that i’m not going to bad mouth him, but that i really, really need to register my displeasure with somebody.

i start by telling the supervisor the long and sordid repair history on my machine which has culminated in this particularly aggravating fiasco. does this strike him as reasonable, i ask? i mean, really, could he in all honesty say the situation had not gone way out side the bounds of normal? certainly, i say, you guys can’t really enjoy losing the scads of cash that you’re losing on me. his reply was a not-so-subtle insinuation that maybe i was a little harder on my laptop than your average joe. i can see this is going nowhere, so i decide that at the very least, i’m going t extract a tracking number from him. for fifteen minutes i listen to him stumble through screens in that way that managers who haven’t had to use the support systems in ages are apt to do. finally, with no small amount of triumphant exasperation in his voice, he slowly reads the shipping number. as i hang up the phone on 5:10 p.m. on friday, i put the tracking number into google and discover much to my surprise that the fedex page indicates that the disks had supposedly been delivered mere minutes before.

perplexed as to why i didn’t hear the doorbell ring, i walk downstairs and see that, indeed, the fedex person had stuffed the disk in the mailslot at presumably almost exactly the same moment that the support manager was reading me the number.

sometimes the computing gods have the dryest sense of humor.