Fresh Coke Anyone?

Hell, I'm starving... well, not "starving", but more like inhumanly thirsty for some coke. I do have a can in the drawer, BUT that's my "emergency-emergency" can.

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So I started writing this entry a few hours ago. Since then I went to the store, the pretty one because the closest one is astonishingly dirty, and I like my coke and crackers PLAIN, not liberally sprinkled with dust, and aged to perfection past the expiraton date before being put on the shelves. Call me unoriginal, traditional and dogmatic, but I like my food "fresh". You see, usually you find the "gracefully aged to dated" products in Chinese stores, where broken stuff are magically held up together, spelled to look "okay" by the gods of these people. The spell, however, is spacebound, because usually as you walk out of the store, the goods rot, break, fell apart, stop, spoil, or any other natural, organic or mechanical procedure that taked the good from good to "waste of your wage". Well, Chinese stores are not the only ones, for this store in the corner is ran by Iranians. But I don't want to be xenophobic on the topic.

As I remember, and this is a piece of information that could aid many currently living or working or studying close to the Mall San Pedro, there's a small store somewhere behind the Z Tower, before reaching the corner of Spoon (a coffeeshop), where you COULD buy soft drinks, water, candies and daily things. I stress the "could" because truth is that you wouldn't really want to. You see, I'm a big fan of chocolates, particularly American chocolates, and usually the ones I like are the harder to get, here. So, back a few years, before I fell in love with Reese, I was all about Butterfinger. I was willing to go to any extent to get it, even buying them old at the store in the mall, just to have them. Well, those "any extent" didn't include the man from that certain store assuring me he had some "somewhere" and then DIGGING elbow deep in a glass counter filled with a lot of crap from old chocolates to pencils, flu medicin and nails. And when I say "full", I mean it was all crammed up in there, and the only way to get your arm into it was by pulling stuff out. All small cavities between things were crammed with grey, greasy, sticky dust and cobwebs. Things got interesting when I saw against the glass a dead cockroach covered in dust and cobwebs getting slowly mashed by the movement of things as the Butterfinger bar was searched.

"Oh... uh... I changed my mind, thank you!" I said and rushed away.

It never ceases to amaze me the degree of messiness acquired by some people, and the best of it, that many of them PRETEND to be liked by a broad audience. Well, I don't know you, but I prefer to buy and eat in clean places. I don't like eatng in a restaurant were rats and cockroaches run around among the clients and the waiters. I don't like to buy my food and stuff in stores that keep everything dusty, spoiled and generally dirty.

This messiness can translate also to poor job. Poor customer service, crappy ensambling, crappy times of answer and crappy solutions. Our company, inspite of all old people and unions could say, is CRAPPY, and people know it, but they don't care, almost as if they've got their jollies out of being outrageously criticized. Our health care is crappy, private medicine is craptacular, with doctors that would diagnose only expensive illnesses and squeeze as much as they can from the patient before it dies.

I have another one for you. At the office I was asigned an HP Compac piece-of-shit laptop. He was known as Nyikolaj Rosztov, later on Azrael, when the demon in it was bigger and more in possession than the machine. Our techs could do nothng against Azrael, so we called HP to demand the warranty for this p.o.s. The dude, a nerd-meets-nerder looking, smelly, never-fucked-anything-but-his-own-hand tech came, said that they covered only hardware, but wouldn't replace the inner mouse (which Smelly Bastard fucked up even more than what it originally was), nor will see why the printer rejected the laptop... printer being HP too. It was decided that Kolya would have his hard drive (did you know that in Hungary they call the hard drive Winchester? ^_^ Well, you know now what would be the name of my next lap top. Or can I rename Omi "Dean" and Nagi "Sam"?) replaced. That was April 22nd. It was said it would be replaced on April 23rd or in five days max. I'm working on a No Name laptop, an HP as well today. Whenever I called the HP people, they promised me that by the end of the week they would replace the winchester. Over and over. Promise after promise.

I e-mailed mad that nothing was done, and then, using my evil contacts, got to a manager at HP and I demanded action. I've got a promise: "We will be installing the new hard drive by June 1st. I'll let you know if something happens and we have to delay".

Okay, No Name is lended. It is NOT my own laptop. Okay, I'll name right not No Name as Vonnegut. I'm having a big Vonnegut moment anyway, so might as well have a name. Anyway, this is not HP letting down Individual Customer Me, it's letting down Corporative Customer, Our Institution. When a company selling posters on Amazon delayed my order two weeks, I wreck havoc royally. Now...

ATTENTION TO ALL COMPUTER AND LAP TOP BUYERS:

DO NOT BUY HP EQUIPMENT. YES IT COMES WITH "WARRANTY" BUT SIT AND WAIT TO SEE WHEN WILL THEY MAKE IT GOOD. IF THEY CAN LET DOWN A CORPORATION, A STATE INSTITUTION, WHAT WOULDN'T IT DO TO YOU?

Don't get fooled by Fergie, Shrek characters and all the people HP is using to advertise. Take my advise: if you want a laptop (which is my area of "expertise") go for IBM, even if they are such motherfuckers as to ship American workers to the India to pay them less, go for Dell, even if they are such sons of a whore that don't let women grow in the company. Go for Mac, go for Acer, go for Sony. Personally I can vouch for the exceptional quality and durability of both IBM and Acer. I've worked so far with Lanix, Dell, Toshiba, HP, Compac and Sony aside from the afore mentioned. Add to it, I can vouch for the customer service of IBM and GBM. They have NEVER let me down. They keep their promises and move sky and earth to do what it takes to get your computer right. Add to it, IBM ThinkPads, just like lovely Acers go the extra mile and keep working nice and fine for YEARS there where other laptops had long died.

But above all, avoid HP like the swine flu. It's even worse.