Support Wars: Return Of The Tech-Jedi

Yesterday saw the final instalment of the Support Wars Trilogy, as I took to the highways to seek out Master Garathon, a fearsomely powerful Tech-Jedi currently residing in the hideous swamps of Dagobah Shropshire.  Within moments my worst fears seemed to have been realised; the problem was indeed so simple that a child could have solved it (indeed, as Garathon noted, an eight year old child is probably exactly what the situation needed), though apparently not a man whose only job is to successfully deal with such things.

A quick re-plugging of a component later (apparently my technique for checking sound connections is insufficiently robust), and everything was solved.

Or was it?  Connecting the stack to a spare monitor revealed no joy.  Not only was there no evidence that the CD drive was fixed, but now there was no evidence that the computer was working at all.  What I now had, in fact, was either an intolerably noisy and ridiculously delicate portable heater, or the world's most power-hungry and unconvincing wasp simulator.

Needless to say, this was all very embarrassing.  I'd already promised Garathon payment in the form of a slap-up meal at the location of his choice (he chose not to pick "your mother", which proves he is a far more mature man than I), but that was based on the seemingly reasonable assumption that even if he failed to deal with the CD drive issue, he would at least avoid demonstrating the Mad Hatter approach to delicate repair work.  Could I renege in the face of his clear incompetence?  Or was the decent thing to buy him dinner, but lace it with paraquat?  Etiquette is a tricky business.

Fortunately, this incredibly awkward situation/upcoming homicide attempt was eventually dealt with once it was discovered exactly where the problem lay: a loose RAM connection.

So, to summarise, PC World:

1. Sold me the wrong hard-drive;
2. Failed to contact me on the telephone, or using the email address I gave them;
3. Were two days late in putting in the new drive and transferring the data on top of the delay from the hard-drive mix up;
4. Failed to reconnect either my RAM or my CD drive;
5. Demanded I give them one week and fifty quid to clean up their own mistake.

Presumably if I had given them their money to deal with the CD drive, the loose RAM would still have fallen out, and they'd have extorted a further fifty pounds in order to fix that, whilst no doubt frying the power supply or trapping an orphan inside the stack in the process.  That's potentially £100 and a fortnight for them to sort out their own mess.  Garathon did it for under a tenner in about the same time as a round trip to the computer store.

Fuck you, PC World.