The Missing Q from my laptop’s keyboard…

Yeah so, the Q on my keyboard isn’t working or only working sporadically when I turn the keyboard around and give it a good smack. From the picture, you can see the worn out S but it’s working fine. I type the word quarterly into search engines to copy paste a Q when I need one, or try to use synonyms, quickly becomes fast. 

I could drag the laptop back again to Best Buy but that would be a pain. (I have a back- up computer, a total of two Dell computers. If you want to know what that’s like, see the famous YouTube video, Buying a PC With Dell: My Journey Into Hell.) If I just explain the Q problem to Best Buy, they will tell me to bring in the laptop.  The laptop is some years old. Its crapping out is inevitable. 

This situation is pretty much the distillation of my experiences with the computer industry. 

From the beginning, the computer industry provided a grandiose vision, still does, (beam me up!) leaving consumers like me stuck with non-working Qs.  Remember PalmPilot?  I built my contacts in PalmPilot, lots of contacts.  I could not transfer them when PalmPilot technology failed. I gave up on building contact lists as a result because, what is the point? 

That’s why AI, which I do use, seems like the latest in a long line of crocks for consumers.  Y2K anyone?  The prompts I have made in AI have sometimes led to some blinkered, wacky results, though a friend tells me I’m doing it wrong. About doing it wrong, notice: how consumers take on more and more of the troubleshooting on these computers when something goes wrong, as if I want to code, or similarly, check out my own groceries, for that matter.

When I go to Best Buy, I am Old Timey, surrounded by stock images of youngsters on gaming consoles.  Most of the laptops are designed for the young. But if you look around, it’s a bunch of Generation Jones* Baby Boomers looking for tech support.  I would guess that Best Buy’s demographics would back me up on this as to their customer base. Yet I don’t see a stock image of a hip, middle-aged lady, happily managing her productivity on her laptop, with her tea far, far away from the keyboard, (the spill happened but lives on as a repressed memory) and her cat. 

While at the same time, Best Buy is my last best hope.  They still provide what America has been heretofore known for, service. I can only hope that Amazon does not squash them.  No matter what, there is still Best Buy’s Geek Squad.  Relieved, because I don’t want to perform a guided diagnostic on the Q anytime soon.  Geek Squad can see me coming from a mile away, with my appointment, and laptop at the ready, it’s me, hi, again.  But maybe I’ll just go in next time and ask the nice Geek Squad staff if that aerosol spray can stuff will work on the keyboard.

*Generation Jones – the younger of the baby boomers, born from 1954 to 1965, who did not witness Woodstock, Vietnam, first generation Elvis, etc., but did witness recession and impeachment.  Now prone to be more vocal about the distinctions of the generation from the original, older baby boomers.  70s kids, playing in the woods with sticks, building forts and biking everywhere until dinner with no guidance, Disco, what was called New Wave music at the time, network news and, last but not least, the advent of the personal computer.  

 


 

 

 

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