My laptop completely crapped out on Christmas Eve. I noticed the keyboard had been sticky for awhile. The space bar didn't always work on the first try. (I'm hard on it; some of the letters had already rubbed off and it was a little over a year old.) On Christmas Eve a whole bank of letters and characters decided to give out completely: no "9," "O," "L," or ">." keys. Troubleshooting it included restarting it, and since my password to access my computer contained some of those non-functioning characters, I was fucked.
The day after Christmas, J. and I decided to venture to Honolulu's biggest mall—Ala Moana—where the Apple Store was located, to see if they could do something about my broken baby. When it took half an hour to move 100 yards, I knew the outing was not going to go well.
If you've never been to Ala Moana, I'll try to give you a taste of what it's like. First, picture your local mall and quadruple it in size. (Unless your local mall is the Great Mall of America. You can leave that as is.) In all my 37 years, I have never been to the mall when it hasn't been under construction.
When I was kid the destination shops were Liberty House (now Macy's), Long's Drugstore, and Shirokiya a Japanese department store which kicked ass then and kicks ass now, especially at the end of the day when the bentos are marked half-off. (If you go to Honolulu, a visit to the Shirokiya food hall is a must.) Shirokiya is where I used to go for all of my Hello Kitty finery and it still has about a quarter of the first floor devoted to Sanrio products and toys. Interspersed between these shops were a motley assortment of slipper stores, crack seed shops (Hawaii's version of a candy store), cafeteria-style diners, and muumuu shops.
Some of the motley shops are still there, but interspersed between them nowadays are shops like Dior, Cartier, Harry Winston, Chanel, Alfred Dunhill, Vuitton (several), and Montblanc. And these aren't tiny outposts, they are flagships positioned to take advantage of Honolulu's status as a cosmopolitan "gateway to Asia." Add to this mallstravaganza, the latest mega-construction project of building a huge Nordstrom, Hawaii's first.
So back to J. and me sitting in a hot, rented mini-van waiting to gain entrance to the mall parking lot. When we finally parked (an hour after we set out on our mission) we didn't care if we were close to the part of the mall where the Apple store was located, we just saw parking and parked. We passed through a random department store and entered the guts of the mall.
Again, Ala Moana is so huge that they have attendants at every map station to help direct patrons to where they need to go. This is in addition to the information desks that are strewn about the mall. We found the first information desk and approached a staffer (one of five) whose name tag said she also spoke fluent Japanese. "Walk down this way," she indicated with her hand, "it's on the right." What she didn't say was that it was about a mile away. (I exaggerate only slightly.)
The other thing about Hawaii is that people walk slow. Everyone is on island time. People don't walk anywhere with a purpose so navigating the mall was pure torture for city-dwellers like us. When we finally reached the Apple store it was mobbed with people spending their Christmas money on iPods and Taiwanese tourists checking their email. When we finally reached the "Genius Bar," they said they'd be glad to help us...tomorrow. At 5:30PM.
So we left.
Dejected, we started the walk back the car with my poor, busted computer in tow. We chatted about whether we should make the appointment and how long they might keep my laptop to fix it. J. put his arm around me and said, "You know, we could just get you a new computer. We could just fix up your other one and sell it later, or use it as back-up" J. always knows the right thing to say. "It could be your Christmas present," he added. I was taken aback a little. We usually don't exchange gifts like that.
I wasn't sure, but thinking about how far behind in work I was, I knew I needed to get back up and running. And soon. "Let's get a coffee and think about it," he suggested.
We made our way down a level to the food court that looked like a small city with every imaginable kind of food from Hawaiian to burgers. Bolstered by a frozen mocha-ccino-type beverage, we decided that we'd go look at the laptops.
Half an hour later we were back in the Apple store surrounded by bleached-blond, skinny-jean-clad Japanese teenagers. The black MacBook sure looked sexy (and appealed to my inner, closet goth), and five minutes later it was mine. (The sales guy pulled one out of thin air, rang us up on his Palm Pilot thingy, and we were gone.)
Once we got home, through the magic of FireWire, it took about an hour to transfer my data from my old laptop to my new laptop. I didn't do anything except push a button. Why anyone would want to use anything other than a Mac is beyond me.
So now, I am up and running again. Which means I have to get back to work, but at least today it's raining.
