2004-04-22 - 8:04 p.m.

Life sure has its weird ups and downs. Well, you know I ordered myself an Apple i-Book on-line, along with an extended protection plan, which they listed as a separate item. Without really thinking, I automatically used my home address as my shipping address, mainly because I simply prefer to get things at home over getting them at work (which I will just have to take home anyway, duh) and besides, why burden our shipping person or the receptionist with packages from me? They've got enough work to do with school-oriented deliveries, without having to be agents for the employee's packages.

I got an e-mail from Apple last night, telling me that they shipped me the extended protection plan; it was shipped two-day air via Federal Express. Federal Express? Oh no! Despite Tom Hanks and the movie "Cast Away," I despise Federal Express! I never, never, ever voluntariy ship anything Federal Express--I am strict a U.S. Post Office or UPS man.

When I lived out in the sticks, or, more properly, up in the mountains, Federal Express would screw me up all the time. I was administering my uncle's estate at the time and it seemed people were constantly sending me legal documents and stuff via Federal Express overnight air. Well, to Federal Express, "overnight air" apparently meant to Sacramento, not where I actually lived, North San Juan, a former gold rush town with a population of under 500 that was a good hour and a half to two hours away from Sacramento. It seemed that somebody would send me something important via overnight air, and then a week later a guy in a beat-up old Plymouth Station Wagon would finally make it up to my house. He'd explain that he was a "contract deliverer," completing the process to places where Federal Express considered "the sun don't shine".

The week's delay was bad enough, but if I didn't happen to be home when he arrived, it was even worse. Federal Express always demanded a signature and if I weren't there to give it, they'd leave a little sticker on my door, saying they would try again another time. Contrast that with my UPS man who, if I weren't there, would quietly secrete my package behind my garage door where he knew I would find it when I got home. If he couldn't leave the item in the garage because the garage door was locked, he understood that I was out of town, in which case he would leave me a note saying he had left me a package with my trusted neighbors. That was fun: getting a package from them meant I'd end up also being treated to an evening of drinking and good stories.

One summer I was coming back across country from a trip to North Carolina and ran into a crew of fire fighters in Utah; there were horrible fires all over the west that summer, and fire fighters were really kept on the move. I spoke to a few of them who were washing their hands in the men's room. "Where you guys headed?" I asked.

"Big fire in California," one of them said.

"Yeah, but great eating!" his companion said.

"Great eating?" I asked.

"Yeah, there's this angel we look forward to seeing whenever we've got a fire in California, name of Hazel...she makes sure you eat!" Yep, that was my Hazel, known far and wide wherever forest fire fighters gathered!

But even here in Los Angeles, Federal Express sucks for home delivery, because there is nobody at home to give them their precious signature, and they refuse to allow the apartment manager in her office to sign for me the way UPS allows her to receive for me. So, Federal Express delivery to me at home means I simply will NOT get the package. They will not accept somebody's else's signature, they will not do Saturday deliveries, and they do not even have a pick-up facility.

So I called Apple to tell them that my extended protection plan was now out in the ozone and would eventually come back to them...could I change my shipping address for the computer, please?

"You'll have to cancel the whole order and start over," explained the guy on the phone, "and besides, you better make sure your credit card company approves the shipping address."

"My credit card company? What do they have to do with where I have something shipped?"

"It's for your own protection, sir," the guy continued. Doesn't he know that stupid phrase is a red flag to a bull? For my own protection, my ass. That's like "Homeland Security." They say it's to protect the populace from terrorists, yet during the Clinton administration, he was stopping terrorist plots right and left even while Monica Lewinsky was kneeling under his desk and he didn't need any "Homeland Security" or "Patriot Act" to do his job.

Bush receives a notice in black and white and red all over, "Al Quida plans hijacked airliner attacks in the United States", he goes to the G8 conference in Italy and they close the air space over the conference situs because they fear hijacked planes crashing into buildings, and Bush says "Nah, let's divert the funds toward building more missiles," yet scuttles his tail down to Florida and asks his brother to declare martial law and call in the National Guard four days before 9/11, just to be on the safe side. (And, let's not forget Ashcroft, then refusing to fly commercial aircraft.) The "allowed to happen" terrorist attacks on 9/11 were a great reason to throw out American civil liberties so that the surveillance of American citizens could be increased (which would have been a dream come true to Ronald Reagan, J. Edgar Hoover, and Eugene McCarthy, all of whom in their various days would have given their eyeteeth to have such a free and clear pipeline into the private lives of innocent Americans) and to administer the "privacy" of citizens, Bush brought into the fold Iran-Contra conspirator Admiral Poindexter and the woman who had run "Double-Click"! (How stupid do they think we are? I mean, some are stupid, obviously, but all of us?)

By the way, I may as well say it now, some of us justified getting rid of Saddam Hussein because he was a viscious torturer, and yet who does Bush appoint to be ambassador to Iraq, but Negroponte, another Iran-Contra conspirator who looked the other way and covered up while soldiers were brutally tortured in interrogation camps in Honduras. No wonder the foreign press reports that Iraqis say they'd rather have Hussein than the Americans, and why they will stop at nothing to kill them all (and why our soldiers arrest, detain, and shoot members of the foreign press). I wonder what our volunteer soldiers, who joined the National Guard, not the U.S. Army, but now find themselves over there in the middle of guerilla warfare, would say about the fact that Bush has also sent mercenaries over there, private, corporate soldiers who are making salaries of $1000 a day? That's some pretty cool change that even our highest paid military volunteers in their wildest dreams would never imagine earning for sacrificing for their country, $360,000 a year for being a soldier! And now there are congressmen who want to reinstitute the draft? Homeland Security is planning on putting up some pretty hefty security devices at the border to make sure none of our twenty-one-year-olds make it over the border to Canada this time! For their own protection, of course.

When they say "it's for your own protection," run like the wind. Apple's customer service guy simply said that if my credit card company didn't know of this shipping address, they would cut this order off at the pass.

I thought to myself, why am I hassling over getting this thing shipped to me, when there is an Apple STORE here in Los Angeles? Yeah, I much prefer ordering on-line where I can see, study, and think about all the options and I don't have to fool with a salesman breathing down my neck, but by now, I knew exactly what I wanted, so why not trot on over to the Apple Store and be working on that movie this very night?

This sounded like a brilliant plan. Notice I said "sounded like".

By the way, I wondered why Apple shipped the extended protection plan separate from the computer, itself. The guy explained to me that the extended protection plan came from a warehouse in the U.S., but the computer is shipped overseas from the country where it is made. Funny, for some reason I thought Apples were made in the U.S. In fact, I thought they were made in Santa Clara or Cupertino, in Silicone Valley. Ha ha ha, stupid me! Of course they aren't made in America anymore. What is? Makes me mad, though.

The Apple Store is in Los Angeles's newest shopping mall, The Grove, which now that I have been there, I liken to "Universal City Walk for Rich People", or maybe "Universal City Walk for PSEUDO Rich People," because honestly, I don't know if rich people actually go to shop at The Grove, but I do know that the people who go shop at The Grove want to be seen as rich people.

The Grove is a sort of "plastered up" designer outdoor plaza kind of place with sidewalk cafe French Brasseries and Italian Bistros and fountains and a pristine blinking-light encrusted cable car taking people up and down the internal streets. It's all very fancy and artificial and probably quite pretty except I just wasn't in a mood to enjoy it, so I am extra sensitive to the contrast between the artificial architecturally planned urban recreational spaces and the genuine, organic thing such as Paris or Rome that rises up through genuine historical development. Whereas City Walk is home to Mexican skinhead gangs and teenage drug dealers (and I am sure that by now Downtown Disney has followed suit), The Grove is home to the kind of people that the average Bush voter from the south and midwest absolutely detests...the latte-drinking, middle of the afternoon outdoor cafe Merlot-sipping, Mercedes-driving, designer-dog-walking, and shopping-shopping-shopping kind of person who has nothing to do all day but worry about what is "la mode". That kind of person makes me nervous, too, but I know voting for Bush isn't the way to stop them, as they are the ones who more greatly benefit from Bush's plans (that is, if they make at least $300,000 a year), while the midwest farmers and southern laborers are finding their lives just drying up and blowing away in a new millenium Dust Bowl.

The Apple Store was almost repellent in its white, silver, clear, and blue elegant beauty. The space was designed to show Apple equipment at its dreamy best, but there was no clear counter or place to seek help, as, instead, there were circular "pods" all over the place, each one surrounded by a kind of "I'm circulating a screenplay, was just cast in a pilot" kind of SUV-driving/intellectual/counting-on-the-eternal-residuals kind of artistic snob. I felt way out of my league in that company and all I wanted was to slip in and buy my i-Book and leave. Instead, in order to determine who in there was sales help, I had to browse among the men fussing over which leather case more securely held the 40GB i-Pod or wondering if 3.25 GHZ was sufficent for utilizing all the advanced features of "Garage Band," particularly if one selected the immensely huge flat "plasma-like" screen to use as a monitor. Honestly, I felt like I was a man from Mayberry R.F.D. wanting a barbershop for a haircut and shave, and was, instead, facing the prospect of being wrapped in a thick Porthault bathrobe and being led into an aromatherapy room in the Burke Williams Beverly Hills Spa in preparation for a seaweed mudpack.

I will say that all that computer equipment was just outstanding and overwhelming and my little i-Book seemed to pale in comparison even if I were getting the 14" screen instead of the 12". There was something about the place that made me feel that if I weren't buying the flat plasma screen, that I was just being so passe.

But actually my order seemed to cause some trouble for the salesman who ultimately did approach me. It seems that my desire for the 1.256 gigabytes of RAM threw him. He said, "None of our machines have that much memory loaded, that is new, I think that won't be available for a couple of months." But I said I had just ordered it on-line yesterday, which sent him into the back room, looking. He came back with a small box labelled "1GB DDR266" and showed it to me, saying, "I think this will work if we install it alongside the 256MB that is built-in, but I will have to find out." This made me nervous. How was I going to be sure that what he "found out" was really the truth? And actually, he had trouble finding out. First he looked on-line, then he asked another salesman, and then he asked yet another one. Finally he told me he would ask "one of the geniuses," and by that I think he meant one of the helpers who work the "Genius" pod, which exists to offer customers with special help. I was wondering how I could be assured that this on-site install of extra RAM wasn't going to be a headache that would hound me for the rest of my ownership of the i-Book, but then I just surrendered to the judgment of the "genius". The salesman came back and said it would work, and then he disappeared to do the install. I was left in the store to contemplate all the other potential purchases and sadly noticed how much more one could get, for so much cheaper, if they got an i-Mac desktop instead of the i-Book laptop, but I had to keep reminding myself that I wanted a laptop and I already had a perfectly good desktop PC.

I also was left to lust after the i-Pods, particularly the one that holds 10,000 songs, which would, I believe hold in a tiny, beautiful white and silver box no bigger than a very thin cell phone my entire CD collection to carry around with me anywhere and play at will in any possible setting. That is amazing, but it is $499 amazing and that is too much right at this exact moment. Maybe later, oh yes, maybe later, because I am convinced that that would be very, very cool. I do not even have a CD player in my car, but a not-working-too-well cassette player and a radio that somewhat weakly pulls in L.A. stations that weren't all that exciting to begin with. The i-Pod can sit in the cup holder and plug into the cigarette lighter and transmit 10,000 songs to the FM radio. I don't quite like the idea of draping cords in my car (which is why using the Discman with the wired cassette-thingy is not a solution I use very often), but still having every single song in my CD collection at my fingertips does have a definite appeal. Ah, technology...and to think that I grew up with 78 rpm records!

After a while, the salesman came back and said, "Sorry, but we don't have the DVD burner, you can only order that on-line." But I wasn't even mad at him, he tried his best, and now I didn't have to worry about the 1 GB of RAM install. Somehow back at home, I would solve the shipping problem.

Getting home, no matter what I tried to do, I could not get the Apple Store page to load. Every other site I wanted to access on the Internet would work, but not the Apple page. What is going on? This is one of those things where you don't know if all this is a sign that you should not buy this thing, or is it a test that asks, "Okay, how much do you really want it?" When faced with such a test, I become, of course, pitbullshark. I want it. I'm going to get it.

So, third time in a row, I placed my order for an Apple i-Book, this time by phone. The third time worked! And I really liked the guy who helped me on the phone. I think I liked him right away when I told him I wanted the educational discount and he said, "You're the sixth student I've had today, what grade are you in?" He couldn't believe it when I said I wasn't a student or even a teacher, but an administrator. "You aren't even a beginning teacher?" he asked, shocked. "You really do sound young." To a guy my age, that can only be received as a complement (and he meant it as one). A teenager might be insulted ("I'm a full grown man!"), but not me!

I also liked it that the guy worked in Sacramento, not some foreign country! Imagine that, a surprise to talk computer on the phone and find yourself talking to somebody in the United States, in California, no less! I wonder, did Arnold have something to do with this? The guy thought so...not about his job, but that his county's sales tax was higher than mine. L.A. charging less tax than Sacramento? I said, "He must need some new weights and is extracting the money from you guys who are closer." He laughed at that.

He didn't balk at my desire to have the computer shipped to my work address instead of my home address, but, nice guy that he was, he did say, "If a purchase of this amount is an unusual charge on the card, you might want to telephone your credit card company and let them know you authorized this charge. When they see it shipping to different address from your home, they might think the card is stolen." Good advice, something I never knew or thought about before.

Discover Card understood the call and the man there added my work address to their list. He said, "When they call to verify this charge, this shipping address will come up as a little bubble. Otherwise, we might have held up the order until we had confirmed with you the purchase." Hmmm, so it was a good idea to call them in advance. Good advice for anyone reading this. And the guy at Discover Card signed me up for 10% rebate on my grocery purchases. (It's actually half that if you want the cash back, but 10% if you trade the award for one of their cashback partners, such as a hotel or rental car chain, and the like.)

All in all, it was an exhausing day, but once again, I've got an i-Book on order, and this time, I'm convinced I will actually be able to receive it!

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