Early to rise

Well, its not that early, but still. With the weather being so crisp of a morning, who wants to get out of bed at all?

This week, more of the same. I have a laptop now to fix, it has a broken DC power jack. A fairly common complaint since it is a fragile piece, and we abuse our laptops, don't we? We take them for granted, and them we are all bummed out when they are broken. Which is OK, just bring them to me to fix.

I had an appointment Monday to deliver a full system I had put together. PC, monitor, color deskjet; running XP home. It was reasonably priced, and included data migration and set up. And then the client backed out. He uses his computer just for email and word processing. The fact that it is a 12 yr old Pentium 2 fossil running Win98 on 128MB RAM, with a dial up internet connection mind you, didn't seem terribly inconvenient after all, when faced with a new-fangled XP system. The old one already has Office 2000 installed (from a relative, not even a legit copy) and has his dialup client (and he can't find the install disks), so using a new one would require.... loading applications. Apparently too much trouble for a retired guy to manage. The fact that I would have done so for free didn't budge him.

The real deal breaker for me was when he asked if he could put the memory card from his camera into the new PC to send photos to people on email. Nevermind that sending a 1.5GB photo over dialup from that old POS would take 37 hours, I said, no, an additional external card reader would be needed. Well, that disappointed him no end. It was unacceptable, you see. I asked him how he does it now, and he answered that he doesn't.

Its like one of those old corny jokes. Except that I'm not laughing.

He said he would call when he got his data connection upgraded (already has cable TV, and a cell phone, so was using sole POTS line for the dial up. Go figure.) If I can sell the system in the meantime, I'll be gladly rid of it.

On the CW biz, we just closed September, and I'm pretty proud. The sales were more than double that of July, nearly double that of August, and within the price of a steak to the best month in the store's history. I intend to shatter that this month.
How cool is that?