TheNamelessThing.com

In anticipation of my impending new computer I drove eagerly to Wal-Mart the other day, in 100-degree heat to buy a set of shelving for my CDs. The CDs have been sitting in stacks on the floor of the computer room, like blocks of flats on some hardwood landscape, gathering dust bunnies and generally getting right on my tits, so, I thought, let's become civilised all at the same time here, with the computer and its various accoutrements.

The shelving I picked weighed about half a ton, and had been crammed into the box in the form of one hundred and thirty six separate pieces, interstuffed with a number of thick asymmetric sections of polystyrene, or Styrofoam, as our yank cousins call it. Each piece was tightly sheathed in a thin sheet of polystyrene (flexible and semi-transparent), and there was the customary plastic bag of ill-labelled hardware and wooden plugs, inexplicable metallic squares, etc. The thing had cost me $40, so I wrongly assumed it must be pretty good, especially when the weight was considered.

After a few minutes spent realising that the pieces were themselves horrifically asymmetric, the fake woodgrain and black finish only covering those surfaces which would be seen by human eyes, and having to unscrew the fastenings from out of their chipboard innards to rotate and reconfigure, thereby completely negating the ability of subsequent screws to gain purchase of the material, I concluded the whole enterprise was doomed and the shelving unit was a sacrilegious piece of utter shit, and set about attempting to reintroduce it to the box from whence it miraculously sprang an hour since. If I'd tried to build the thing as instructed in the (aaarrggghh!!) instruction manual, it would have been swaying like a skyscraper in a hurricane, laden with CDs or not, and the thought of that caused me pain. We have two very energetic cats and the probability of one of them demolishing the whole garbage set-up wholesale was high indeed.

We only have one air-conditioner in our house, and that is in the bedroom so the missus can sleep in the daytime heat, as she works nights, and I was a dripping, streaming wreck of a man by the time I had managed to cram the bleeding things back into the box.

Why is it that Wal-Mart only sells junk furniture? In fairness they refunded my money without so much as a whimper, and allowed me to shoot off to Target and grab a steel CD rack which was twice as good and cost less than half as much. For some reason these stores always refund you cash, even when you pay by debit or credit. There has to be an evil motive in that somewhere, doesn't there?

This morning a bloke came and set-up my computer for me. I'd been conned into paying the extra TWO HUNDRED FUCKING DOLLARS by Best Buy, because, quote, Windows Vista is just soooo difficult to install, spyware-wise and anti-virus-wise, that even the guys who spiel you the details on the shop floor, themselves computer experts to a man, had to rely on their tech people to install their PCs for them...so you get the picture.

Once the thing was up and running it became quickly evident that several icons of a strictly commercial nature adorned the desktop, in addition to an array of others which apparently were of no use to man nor beast, and which the bloke deleted (thus far I could have performed the entire operation with fifteen gin 'n' tonics inside me, and had had to make it clear to him that it wasn't he I was pissed off with, but the lying bastards at the store who had jumped on the chance to squeeze an extra couple of hundred out of saps like me, who, in fairness, did press them mildly for a description of how much computorial acumen someone must lack before qualifying as the kind of cockhead who had to pay the extra two ton, only to receive the same worried tale of just how it was sooooo dodgy and hard to predict what disasters might befall he who ventures into such pastures, blah,blah, blah....)

Anyway, the useless/commercial icons on the desktop included such luminaries as Ebay, AOL (surprise!!!), and many more, and the feller explained that these companies pay Hewlett Packard (in this case) to allow them to be displayed on folks' new computers, and that this, in effect, brought down the cost of the computer for dicks like myself who then went and opted for the UNNECESSARY we'll-come-and-set-it-up-in-yor-home deal.

By the time the sun had set today, and we'd discovered that not only is Vista INCOMPATIBLE WITH MANY CURRENT AND COMMONLY USED SOFTWARE PROGRAMS (including the web client that the missus uses to access her work database and which is very important to her) but that it is also NOTICEABLY SLOWER THAN XP too, both myself and the missus were about ready to join a suicide cult and cut off our own genitals before plunging into a vat of boiling oil while saluting in the general direction of Halley's comet. Sheesh!