Incompetence In Action

We bought my Mom (Nana) a new computer for Christmas. I used to put them together myself, but I'm done with that. Her old one was one I put together for her years and years ago and it finally gave up the ghost a couple months ago (I think it was an AMD K6-300 if that gives you a clue as to how old it was). So I needed to transfer her old data to her new computer. To facilitate this I bought a USB external hard drive case at Best Buy earlier. Unfortunately I bought a 2.5 inch model instead of the 3.5 inch model I really needed (no jokes about size issues here please). Anyway, today Ginger's family headed home, and Ginger and Catherine went with them down to Potomac Mills to do some drive by shopping. So Quinn, Nana and myself had the place to ourselves. First we headed to the Post Office to finally mail out the Christmas cards that should have gone out last week (and would have had Ginger not gotten sick). From there we went to Silver Diner for lunch (much like Chic-Fil-A, Silver Diner is on the no fly list for restaurants Catherine cat eat at because they cook with peanuts, so Quinn can only go if Catherine isn't around). After lunch I decided to stop by CompUSA across the street because I still needed an external HD enclosure. Once I was in CompUSA I went back to the hard drive section and found the external enclosures. All of them were $45 to $50, which seemed a bit high to me. I had seen them online between $20 and $30, so I was expecting to pay between $30 and $40. Then I see a sign for a sale price of $25 for the CompUSA model. I'm thinking "Hook me up". But there's none to be found on the shelf where the sale sticker is. In fact, the product above the sale sign has a slew of enclosures with a different SKU number. An employee sees me and starts to try to walk away (great customer service there), but I manage to get her attention and drag her over. I mention I'm interested in the model listed as being on sale, but can't locate it on the shelf and was wondering if they have any in stock. She spends about two minutes looking at the shelf (because I can't possibly be right about it not being there, but I'm willing to cut her some slack on this, since stuff on shelves can get moved all over the place), then she wanders off and walks up to the front desk and then returns and tells me they're sold out. Now I watched her walk up there, and she never entered anything on the computer (she never even went behind the desk, she may have talked to someone, but I couldn't tell since she wasn't facing me). Plus she didn't even note the SKU number before she left. So I asked her if she actually checked the computer to see if they had them in stock and she responds with a "Uhh, yea, I did. We're out." She asks if I want to check on availability at another store, so I say yes even though I could care less (because at this point I've decided I'm certain that she's lying to me). As we're walking over to a computer to run the check, we pass this.


It's a whole freaking display of the items in question. There's like over a 100 of them. None in inventory, yea right. Must have been a computer glitch when she checked earlier. I guess the story does have a happy ending (not that kind of happy ending, come on, minds out of the gutters) since I actually got the item and as a bonus it was only $20 and not $25. And it worked too, I was able to successfully transfer all the documents from the old hard drive to her new computer. Sadly much of the rest of the night was spent installing tons of software and applying no fewer than 44 Windows high priority updates.

Random picture from Christmas day. We had candles floating in glasses during dinner for added ambiance.