em0, having gone without her own computer for more than a month, could barely contain herself wednesday. she finally had the pile of cash necessary to purchase a replacement for her intermittently troublesome ibook. or rather, *i* had her pile of cash. some weeks earlier i had agreed to buy her 1994 saturn, but i held the money until she saved the remainder of the new ibook's purchase price.
last weekend, that day arrived, but owing to an intractable computer science assignment i was not able to go with her to buy the computer. like a small dog with a chew toy and an undiagnosed neurosis, she nipped and yipped to go buy this computer. i offered to go to the bank and withdraw the money, but she wanted taxi service to the mac store.
not that i like driving through the never-ending construction hell-hole that is kendall square or anything. em0 also promply forgot how to get there. after driving around several times, we decided to stop and ask directions. i pulled over to the side of the road, where there was an open ditch in which the car promptly became stuck.
of course, there were no road cones or any other such devices to warn unsuspecting drivers of this ditch, which could not be seen until the last minute if one were say, driving directly facing an intense glare of early afternoon sunlight. a cop tried to help us get the car out, but it became clear that a call to AAA was warranted. the befuddled woman on the other end tried to take down my details when i looked up to see a group of burly construction workers surrounding my car. before i could say anything, they lifted the car up and out of the ditch without the aid of any equipment whatsoever.
em0 found our way to the mall. i tried to pay for the computer at the mac store with my debit/credit card, but it was declined because the purchase price of the computer was more than the maximum withdrawal limit for that day. go figure. i paid for it with a real credit card and did an electronic payment from my band account to the credit card account online.
the mac store is a beautiful store, with soft lights and beautiful machines laid out like gourmet dishes. however, until i can buy all the parts i need to build one for 300-400, i will continue to run a linux box. which is too bad because new macs are all linux boxes now. they have merely taken the rough edges off linux and made it into a user-friendly OS. i'm still not sure if something will work when i try to run a program that came with my suse distro.
we pioneers have it so hard.
1 comment:
n.b. the 1994 saturn is named "emily".
also, we didn't get "stuck" - the front right wheel fell into a 1' wide, 2' deep ditch. which, as you noted, was unmarked and the sun was making it impossible to see anything. point is, we were long beyond stuck.
until contruction workers picked up the car for us. saved a nice triple-A service call that would have taken forever and meant No Computer That Day, In Fact Go Back On Public Transit Please Thru The Frozen Wind And Snow For Making You Fall Into A Ditch.
ach, well. how can we reasonably be expected to find a place by car in cambridge when they change the street layouts on a weekly basis anyway?
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