Laptops? Where? | Articles | the bombsite

You can get fed up with styling after a few days so I thought I’d break the monotony with a post.

My son, who you may have read will be going to Uni in a couple of weeks, decided that a laptop would be a good addition to the arsenal of tools that he will be taking with him. So on Monday, as his Mom works (poor sod), I decided to offer transportation facilities to PCWorld to see what we could find. After much inspection and deliberation he plumped for 2 which had more or less the same specs and price tags. Actually the one looked rather cool with it’s metallic blue outer casing. I then dropped him at home so he could persuade Mom to stump up the necessary readies when she got back from work.

About 7:30pm Monday evening I got a phone call from a very irate Mom. On my mobile at that. (Despite having had a land-line for over a year now and despite my son having had the number for almost as long it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him to let Mom have it. And I’m sure I’ve mentioned the idea to him!) The call lasted almost an hour so it must have cost her a packet! Anyway it turns out she’d taken him back to PCWorld with the purpose of making a purchase only to be told that both, yes both choices were out of stock !! When she asked the sales person when they would have more in he simply replied, “I’ve no idea. Head Office deals with that.”

Two things crossed my mind almost immediately: first, if they are out of stock what the frigging hell are they doing on the shelf?; second, this is PCWorld. They sell computers. Surely they have a pretty good computerised system to enable them to keep in touch with Head Office so they know what the frig is going on!!

My son has kind of gone off the idea of a laptop now and has decided that, for the same kind of price (we’re talking around £700 here), he can get a PC with far better specs. Well miniaturisation does cost a bomb doesn’t it? Have you seen how small some of these laptops are? You could almost pop them in your jacket pocket! And the smaller they get the more they cost. Jeez!!

So today (Wednesday) I took him to Comet, Staples, Currys and PCWorld again, keeping an eye out for a laptop but concentrating more on the PCs. Whilst we were in PCWorld we passed a young lady looking at a PC with a sales person in close attendance. (She was a bit of a looker.) Just as we passed I heard her ask “So what’s the difference between this one and the other one?” The reply from the sales person was “Well you tell me.” The first words out of my mouth to my son (probably well within hearing distance of the sales person. Heck I’m too old to give a damn these days.) were “Now there’s a novel sales technique”.

Now it’s obviously just not my son’s week. In Currys we found a lovely PC – Advent, Pentium 4, 512MBs DDR RAM, 3 GHz, 120 GB hard drive, DVD writer with separate CD-ROM drive, only 64MB video but it was G-Force and 15” TFT monitor. Looked nice too. £699 which was the same price as the 2 laptops and way more powerful. Guess what? Out of stock!! I felt like dropping the sales assistant there and then. I summoned up the courage to ask when they would be in stock again and we were told that their computer system was down so he couldn’t check. Are you getting the general idea here?

We went back home again with the vague sort of notion that he would return on Friday with Mom’s credit card in tow and maybe his chosen PC would be back in stock. There was another there that wasn’t quite as good but they did seem to have plenty so if his first choice didn’t materialise he would get that one instead.

When we got back to my place I suggested we go on-line to Currys web site and see what we could find there. Maybe the one he was after could be delivered. Well it just so happens we found one slightly better as it had 128 MBs video and was only £629 plus carriage which would bring it up to £650. So a better spec and a saving of £50. That brightened him up and he went home with the intention of ordering it tonight via his Mom’s credit card. I am now waiting for an email or message of some kind telling me that it’s

OUT OF STOCK!!!.