George Orwell would love big chains like Best Buy and CompUSA. The doublethink they employ takes common sense, ties it in a knot and then bends you over and sticks it where the sun doesn’t shine.
I think the part that Orwell would like the best is that we are taught not to rebel against assaults on common sense, instead we are told – “Oh, that’s the fine print.” or “Thats company policy.” and we are supposed to be good little consumers and accept it.

Let’s examine my Best Buy encounter yesterday. We will stick with facts.
Sony camera on sale as an ‘outlet item’ for 69 bucks. You can order them and pick them up at the store. There are nice pictures online, but I actually like to take a good look at something before I purchase it. So I drive to the store and ask for the item. They have it in stock, but they say it is 110 dollars. Oh no, I say – here is the printout – 69 bucks. Nope, I am told (by the store manager). That is an outlet center item. I can order it and they will ship it for free, but I can’t buy it at the store at that price.

How much stupidity can we identify in this?
1 – the same item is being sold by the same store – at two different prices.
2 – Best Buy thinks its smarter to spend money on shipping instead of just handing me an item.

I thought I might get some satisfaction from complaining about this on Best Buys user forums, but the stream of stupidity that I got in return just pissed me off more.
Multiple people telling me – yup, the store can’t do a price match on an item like that.

Think about that carefully. Best Buy can’t “price match” against….themselves!

And I’m told I could have ordered the item and picked it up there.
Thats right – I could have spent 69 bucks on it, walked into the store and got a camera.
But if I walk into the store, it cost 110 bucks.

Orwell is alive and well and working in management.

I was chatting with JT during his show on Sunday. He said something like “I heard you had some problems with your equipment on your Saturday show….but then you always have problems, don’t you?”

I felt a little insulted – mainly because it was absolutely true.
I feel like me and my hardware are playing a zero-sum game lately. I upgrade one piece and something else breaks. I bought more memory and a new fan for my Ableton laptop – and my desktop monitor dies.
I get a new monitor – and my broadcast laptop dies.

I don’t know how old that laptop is, but it’s about 105 in human years. It can record and broadcast audio just fine, but a simple flash game will cripple it. Here’s a good idea of it’s age. I upgraded the RAM from 256megs to 768megs a few years ago.

5 minutes before showtime on Saturday, it turns off and doesn’t turn back on. (Maybe it didn’t like being vacuumed, but damn, it’s dusty in my basement!) It finally came back on later that day, so I guess it just wasn’t in the mood for house music.

For various reasons, I hadn’t done a live set on Infinity in what felt like ages. I did a house set with Ableton this Saturday and was quite pleased with it. 5 minutes before the show is over – BAM – Ableton goes down. So the set was lost.

I spent Sunday evening backing up my Ableton laptop, reformatted and reinstalled Windows XP, and reinstalled Ableton. Oh look, version 8.2.2 is out. Will that be any more stable? There is nothing in the release notes that hints that it will be. Bah.

Well, as long as I’m having a bitch session – Youtube is stuck as I type this. The two videos I uploaded are stuck in processing hell. All my uploads last week were processed super quick. It’s been my experience that if they haven’t processed within a few minutes, they ain’t gonna process. (I’ve waited 24 hours before with no luck.) So, time to cancel and restart.

And it’s frickin’ snowing outside!