Eeeediots!

[elfs]

This afternoon, Omaha took Kouryou-chan out to watch Curious George, and I, having a family-friendly 87 minutes to sit around and wait for them, wandered over to CompUSA. I was going to implement Charlie Stross's recommendation to writers and buy a USB keyboard for my laptop so I could type into the laptop without wearing it out the native keyboard. That happened to Lain, remember, and I'm sure I don't want it to happen to my new laptop, Kusanagi, which finally came in the mail after three and a half months of waiting.

The people at CompUSA are morons. I found a $10 USB laptop and found a salesgeek. "Does this work with Linux?" I asked. The question was somewhat rhetorical; I was reasonably sure it did, but I wanted some confirmation. Anyway, the dude at CompUSA said, and I quote, "Uh, I don't know."

"Well, do any of these work with an iBook?" I said, knowing that the Mach USB keyboard drivers for iBooks were reasonably close to the drivers for Linux, and if one existed the other probably did too.

"You mean, like a Mac?"

"Yeah, like a Mac."

"I don't know." He turned the box over. "Says here it works with Windows 2000 and Windows XP. So probably not."

Whatever happened to customer service? Look, if you want to make a sale, you could go and see if that brand and model has a driver for my computer, yes? And then I might buy it, yes? Do floor people just not get commissions anymore? That's not right.

Comments

[solarbird]

I asked a guy in a CompUSA store once if this external network card had drivers for the packet driver system. (It said "drivers included for all network operating systems" but didn't list them on the outside of the box.) He told me that cards didn't need drivers now because, and I quote, "they don't have the little relays inside anymore." Which I had him repeat, because I couldn't believe that's what I'd just heard.

The only thing I could think of to say was, "Ooh... kay. Could I speak to someone who knows anything whatsoever about networking now, please?" He wasn't real thrilled with that.

similar story...

[-pollox.livejournal.com]

had one try and convince me once that you could run a PC without RAM because they had at least some memory built-in to the motherboard... I think that was at a best buy...

Re: similar story...

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of the time I bought a bad DVD drive (now remembered because my current one died tonight) and the first-tier moron at Sony wouldn't give me an RMA number because I had used it under Linux and that voided my warranty. I bitched and moaned and he gave me to the next tier, who told me that it was a hardware problem, he knew it, I knew it, and here's the RMA, and the first tier idiot is, indeed, an idiot. It was nice to talk to someone sane for once.