MeMag - Me Magazine

Seems that it is impossible to track down a portable MAC in Oslo. There is a shiny new Apple Center downtown where the actual prizes seem to be much higher than the ones they advertize in their catalogue. I tried calling them, but the automated answer spoke of a different store than the one I called. A misprint in the phonebook? The voice said “Our opening hours are… bla bla… to 4:30 on weekdays. Have a nice day”. It then disconnected me. I looked at the clock. It was 4:10. Is there a logic here that I’m missing?

The other options are various photo stores that don’t actually have any MACs in stock. They just take orders and add a fat percentage. They are unable to even give you the specifications for each model. One of these stores had some specs on their web site, but either these are several years old or they take out some parts like the extra memory Apple includes in the newer models. It is also uncertain if they are able to get you anything at all. You might end up on a waiting list that binds you to one particular store that won’t actually be able to procure you the computer in the end.

I suppose the logical choice about now would be to look at PCs instead. But I know that it’s still the same world of gum-chewing tanned young salesmen with blank stares. And disfunctional phone support. You may end up talking to someone in India as opposed to in Ireland, but that is the only difference. One isn’t better than the other. The good deals are still only found in online stores that don’t actually carry anything. It’s a mail-order world. Nothing works. It’s just hollow advertizing. Spam. It’s sickening. At least my old MAC has lasted for years with no problems, whereas I have gone through 4 PCs in the same time-frame. A lifespan of 5 years plus in the world of computers is fairly close to eternity. No wonder these affordable lightweight portable MAC things are impossible to find. They are mythical, like unicorns or erections that last forever. Everyone wants them. But in the end, they probably don’t even exist.

It turns out that behind the shiny white luster of Apple’s web shop, lurks the usual web of broken links, confusing information and the completely useless telephone support system one has come to associate with modern day electronics shopping.

Yesterday I attempted to order a Powerbook from Apple’s semi-Norwegian web shop. Not easy. The first task was to find a browser willing to display the site properly. Apparently Apple’s online store is less than enthusiastic about MACs. This is may be because the Norwegian version of the store seems to be the international one, which some egghead has attempted to translate word-for-word into Norwegian.

The result is a buggy page, half in english, half in Norwegian, riddled with grammatically pointless sentences and things like address input fields that do not fit our local postal codes. You often end up on pages with missing headers so that you have use the browser’s back button to return. This leads to postdata warnings and more confusion. Some pages are just blank.

Eventually I thought I had it figured out well enough to place an order. I ignored the warnings that my address didn’t exist, after first having a good look around the apartment to confirm that it was indeed there. After twenty minutes or so, I finally managed to add a laptop to a shopping cart. This landed me on a page for custom configurations. There were drop down boxes for adding larger hard drives and more memory. Stuff like that. However, these did not contain any options. They were just dropdown boxes for the sake of having dropdown boxes.

One input option that did work was a field labelled (in Norwegian) “Add an additional keyboard and select OS”. Fair enough, but the dropdown choices seemed to indicate that the “additional keyboard” was in fact the choice to have the regular keyboard either with English characters or localized Norwegian ones. We have a few extra letters in our alphabet that largely serve to make anything written in Norwegian incompatible with the rest of the electronic world.

I placed the order, after which I got cold feet. What had I really ordered? And when would it arrive? The product info page said 3 days, the confirmation page said 4-6 days and the confirmation mail said 5-7 days. I called the support number. After ages of waiting on a bad connection, listening to a nice mix of support messages in Norwegian and English with an Irish accent, I finally reached one of the default support zombies. He listened to my question on keyboards. He didn’t answer. I said “hello?” “I’ll transfer you”, he said, sending me back into the menagerie of support messages and press-this-and-that choices.

This led me to a young seemingly lobotomized Swedish-speaking woman who didn’t understand a word I was saying. She asked me if I minded repeating everything in English. I did but she still had no idea what I was talking about. She tried to remedy this by speaking sloooow-lyyy and LOUDly in bad english. She still didn’t know anything about localized keyboard options. Even though I had all the codes for the various options. “Iiii doooon’t under-staaand”, she said. “Please cancel my order”, I said.

Today I awoke in a state of panic, knowing that a fate worse than death awaited me… It was almost too horrible to think about: I knew that today I had to assemble a piece of Ikea furniture for my mother. The horror… The horror…

The mission target was Vättern, -a small bathroom cupboard named after a lövely lake in Sweden. It was clear from the beginning that this was a doomed project. Or rather… it was clear a lot sooner than the beginning that this was a doomed project. -One has been subjected to Swedish furniture earler in life. One bears the emotional scars.

The first part of the mission had already been accomplished by my mother, so I didn’t have to endure the hours she had spent driving back and forth between various storage outlets in order to get all the required parts. My job seemed simple by comparison, -follow the instructions and assemble accordingly.

Enyone who has ever attempted to decode Ikea blueprints are already sniggering. It cannot be done. Even the little cartoon men in the 5 different and conflicting instruction booklets seem to know this. Like me they seem unable to figure anything out. It’s written all over their faces.

The instructions start off with an omnious warning that “the assembly should be carried out by a qualified person, due to the fact that wrong assembly can lead to that the furniture /object topples or falls resulting in personal injury or damage”.

Good God. Not only do I feel hopelessly underqualified to put together a puzzle that would probably leave all the combined engineers at Nasa in tears. But the result may even be that this tiny two-foot cupboard topples over and crushes me to death. It’s all just more responsibility and danger than one neurotic can handle.

Nevertheless… since danger is my middle name, I dive into the work with stoic patience. I shall not let this insane project break me. My mother is handing me various screwdrivers like a trained surgeon’s nurse, perfectly anticipating every requirement. We joke about screws that don’t fit the readymade screwholes and the impossible stupidity of the instructions. We are having a good time. A few hours later a small rickety cupboard is produced from the huge stack of flat packages. It looks odd. Very odd. But as long as it has a wall to lean into, it stands proudly and has room for at least 3 towels and a bar of soap. Who could ask for more?

Left: the parts left over when finished. Right: The square legs of the diagram compared to the round aluminium stilts in the package.

The tools needed for the job.

Everybody complains about crime and layoffs and globalization. How the world is becoming more cold and chaotic every day. But nobody speaks of the real problem; the elderly. I mean… these people are everywhere. You can’t go to the market and buy a nice frozen dinner and a sixpack without having to wait in line for half an hour because some old git has decided to pay for his or her cat-food in small coins, individually wrapped in pieces of cellophane or newspaper-paper. And tell the cashier everything about their dead spouses and failing health.

They know they waste everybody’s time. They just don’t care. People generally become more conservative and more selfish the older they get. So by the time they reach 80, most people are ready to introduce public executions and to bring back slavery. Opinions they are never afraid to voice. Loudly.

Today I had to take the bus to visit my parents to sort out their weekly computer problems. This bus route (#61s in Oslo) has been completely taken over by gangs of elderly people. They push their way in and take up at least two seats each. Then they pester the driver into stopping at least fifty times between the stops because they cannot walk, even though this doesn’t stop them from spending the entire day on their feet, blocking the way for normal people everywhere.

Todays subject of conversation on the bus was a fire in one of the apartments in one of the buildings near where they live. They didn’t know who lived there and what had happened to them. Still, a conclusion was quickly reached. -It had to be black people. Those people just don’t care. What a brilliant piece of deduction! Obviously black people gladly burn their own home down just for the hell of it. I can see them now, shrugging their shoulders… “Heeey…. you burned your home down”… “so?”. We all know what they are like, don’t we? Everyone on the bus nodded in agreement. The next topic, God help me, was the war in Iraq. The old bag next to me couldn’t comprehend why the newspapers wrote about that. “Sixty people killed in Iraq”, she said. “Why do they waste time writing about that? I was locked out of my apartment for three hours the other day”.

As usual I evacuated the bus a couple of stops early. I can’t stand it on that bus. They all stare at me like I am some sort of juvenile delinquent Beelzebub with huge horns and red smoke piping out of my ears. Because I’m under 65. To them everyone older than 14 (who isn’t part of the royal family) is scum. Except for other old people. I’ve had to watch my own father change after he retired. All these brilliant ideas suddenly appearing in his head. He caught a cold once and was convinced that someone had traveled all the way from Africa to sit next to him on the subway train and give him that cold. On purpose. If I try to take him out for a coffee, he will do things like burping improbably loud, or bursting out things like “dear God… look at that fat cow sitting on that table! She’s huuuuge! Look how ugly she is!” He doesn’t care. He is old.

Now he doesn’t go out anymore. He just sits and moans about his health. No doctors can find anything wrong with him. Of course… his regular doctor isn’t even a proper one. He is from Pakistan. My father refuses to understand a word he says even though he speaks fluidly. So he makes his own cocktails of pills. And ends up feeling even worse. He will get absolutely furious if anyone tries to have a conversation that isn’t about his health. If something else is discussed, he will just interrupt it right away. Today my mother and I ignored his complaints for a short while. She wanted to know how I was doing. His solution to this was to pretend to throw up.

Still everyone is always going on about how important it is to respect the elderly. And who have taught them this? That’s right: The elderly. It’s all a scam. They do nothing to deserve anyone’s respect. I can’t think of a more useless arrogant group of people. And they are allowed to vote? And even in many cases drive? It’s shocking. Anyone with an ounce of self-respect would kill themselves at 75. But of course they don’t. They demand that everyone else take care of them instead. We seriously need to get rid of these people. Put them in institutions, I say! It’s not like they know where they are half the time anyway. Confiscate their money and give it to young people so they can have some fun. Hide them away in homes. Cheap, senile incontinent bastards!

Each time there is some sort of camera equipment I want to try out to expand my visual vocabulary, it proves completely impossible to find. If I do come across something for sale, it always costs about the same used and worn out as it does new. Why? Because a ten year old Leica or Rollei is rare? Because they only ever made ten copies and they were all hand-coated in gold by naked cuban virgins? No. It’s because all these middle-aged rich assholes feel they need to have twenty copies of every camera ever made on their shelf so that they can show them off to other middle-aged assholes as trophies. They never use them because they have no talent for anything except to deprive the market for every piece of decent second-hand tool in existance. If it wasn’t for these people, young unestablished creative people could pick up old but fully functional equipment and make wonderful things with it. But no. A few people need to own it all and push all prices up. Scum. This really pisses me off. I mean… What if you had to pay $3000 for a screwdriver because I owned them all? Huh? Would that seem reasonable to you?

In a country like Norway there is quite a bit of segregation between what movies are shown in the theatres and what movies are released on DVD. While the state-run cinemas focus mostly on more highbrow “art-house” movies that our beloved government has decided are good for us, only the most mainstream of foreign movies are released on DVD. As a population we are really intensely shallow. Most people will go to a cinema and watch some of the deeper non-Hollywood stuff because everyone else is doing it, and they will also watch absolutely any domesticly produced films out of shere patriotism. But when they rent or buy, they want their Hollywood action heros.

So a weirdo like me who may want to see something like this, will have to buy it online. With 25% import tax on DVDs added to the costs of shipping an item all that way across the ocean, the final cost of each DVD is almost doubled. Still it is cheap compared to an imported movie bought is a typical special interest store here in Oslo.

The task then is to find the online stores that offer low shipping rates and reasonably short delivery times. And here we get to the point of this post: how absurdly difficult it is to find an online store that doesn’t screw you one way or the other. For instance, I have spent the last four months waiting for an order from the ironically named dvdsoon.com. Is there anything more useless than a store that takes your money and never actually gives you anything in return? They should consider a name-change to dvdpossiblywithinhtenextsixmonthsifwefeellikeit.com. They claim that the item is in stock until you order it. Your card is charged right away. Then you wait for a few weeks until they tell you that the movie isn’t in stock. You can change your order for something else, but that won’t be in stock either so there really isn’t any point. What a rip-off.

So far the only positive result I have had has been through Amazon. Even though I’m not usually one who support huge multi-national companies, I have to admit that there is something to be said for consumer rights. So my advice to new online shoppers is simply that they should buy everything from amazon.com or amazon.co.uk and forget about the rest. At least until the internet is at least ten years older and more stores will have proper secure servers and shopping carts and order and shipping rutines that actually work. I’ve also been told that it is theoretically possible to live without watching a couple of movies each day, but until I see some hard evidence to support that, I remain sceptical.