So went the conversation between me and the sales guy at a small computer shop in Constantia Village called IT Dot Com Computers.  It wasn’t a good moment. And even if, in recollection, I haven’t gotten the words exactly right, I got the sentiment spot on.

Look, I’m a geek. There are four computers in my house. They work, mostly, and when they don’t I can usually fix them. But this time round I just couldn’t. So I did the geek equivalent of a male stopping to ask for directions – I took it into a shop for another geek to fix.

Having dropped it off on a Monday it was now Friday afternoon and we were no further forward. And, to boot, I’d phoned them four times during the week and, each time, extracted a promise that someone would phone me back. It never happened. Eventually I said I would just go and collect it and take it somewhere else. When I got there, I was told it had been fixed, so I parted with the cash while they were unplugging it and it was returned to me with the graphics card which had previously been inside the computer, now perched on top like a wart on a witches hand. The salesman and I looked at it.
“What’s that?” I asked
“Your graphics card,” he said.
“Yes I can see that, but why is it sitting on top of my computer?”
“Because it was faulty.”
[Salesman looks pleadingly at sulky woman behind the counter who was fiercely focused on the screen in front of, not wanting to get involved.]

And then the conversation above took place.

It’s all quite desperate – and that wasn’t the worst of it. We’ll come to the worst bit in a second – but let me just try and contextualise my disappointment. I like supporting the little guys – the small independent shops that rely on a personal relationship with their customer. If I’m going to part with cash, I’d rather it went to them than to some glossy, crisp corporate computer vendor who relies on high turnover and commission-earning staff at the expense of some goodwill.

But I suspect “goodwill” and even “customer” are not words frequently thrown around the offices of IT Dot Com Computers. They clearly don’t give a flying toss about either.

Now usually I would have  taken it back to the place I bought it (Computer Mania) or the place with the shiniest new toys (Incredible Connection) but my love for the little guy got the better of me, and I thought supporting the small, independent computer shop close to my home would be The Right Thing To Do. I’d been in there once or twice and bought a couple of things, and they seemed like nice enough people. And one can only take so much of the commission-earning leeches at Incredible Connection who pounce on you as you step through the door, shadow your every step and whip anything you’re vaguely interested in buying out of your hands to scrawl their employee number across the pricetag. (Monthly targets and commissions are to a happy and trustworthy shopping experience what Britney Spears is to thrash metal.) And that’s why I was at IT Dot Com Computers in the first place. Big mistake.

And so what was the worst bit?

I left the store under a dark cloud and decided to vote with my wallet. I swallowed my prejudice and went to Incredible Connection, where I dropped R1000 on a brand new graphics card. I get home, install it, boot up the PC and it all seems fine. First thing I do is go to windowsupdate.com to get SP3 installed. Halfway through that process, the computer reboots itself.

It reboots itself.

In other words, it does the very thing it was doing before. The thing I had paid R250 and waited a week to have fixed. The thing I was assured by the guy at IT Dot Com Computers would be rectified now that the evil old graphics card had been eliminated. The reason I had spent not just R250, but R1 250. Not fixed. Still broken.

And the final insult? Windows decides that my ntfs.sys file is corrupted. No sweat – I’ll just do what Google tells me and copy it over from my XP installation disk…you know, the one I left in the drive when I took my computer in to IT Dot Com Computers? THE DISC THAT IS NO LONGER IN MY COMPUTER.

Sigh. So much for supporting the little guy. Christmas is around the corner. I intend spending lots of money on technology this year – upgrades all round. Now what are the chances of me spending a cent at IT Dot Com Computers? I doubt the guy I spoke to was the owner and, in fairness, he was really just cleaning up other peoples’ mess. But, as they say in Moscow, Toughsky Shitsky. It never fails to amaze me when companies work so hard to get customers across their threshold and then proceed to screw it up so badly. I was there. I had an open wallet. I wanted to spend. I wanted my computer to be fixed, whatever the price. I just wanted someone, anyone, to phone me back. Just once. But they didn’t.

Remember the .COM crash from a few years back? Well generally I wish no-one ill, but in this case I wouldn’t lose a second’s sleep if this Dot Com went the same way. As long as they give me back my XP disc first.

There. Thanks for listening. I feel better now. My computer still doesn’t work, but I do feel better, and that’s the main thing.

I have such a box of copulating cables. Long ones, short ones. Every kind of one. It seems that each time you buy an electronic something these days it comes with enough cardboard packaging to make Al Gore break into a disorienting fever, and three too many cables. It’s always three. You plug your new gadget together and there, leering up at you from the bottom of the ripped and shredded plastic container, are the extra wires.  When they arrive they come with those tiny wire cable ties holding them tight and snug, but beware: the moment you untie the tempting little twisted thing you will never get that cable to look as neat again. But there’s actually no reason to untie them anyway, they serve no purpose. They’re just there, to taunt you.  And to be put into the box.

So over the years you do that. You feed the box-beast.  My box is on the top of my clothes cupboard. It’s the box that my first VCR came in a decade or so ago, and it has lasted longer than the machine. Go figure. But it serves a purpose –as den of iniquity for my extra wires.
Sometimes, late at night, I think that the cables have a party. They get the thinnest wire (that would be the digital audio cable from my new CD ROM drive) to stretch itself over the open end of the box. Much like a guitar string. All the other cables, led by the sinister RCAs who think there is safety in numbers and that, therefore, they own the place, use their end bits to strum the improvised guitar. This creates a low hum, not dissimilar to an LSD-induced experimental album from the 70s.

OK, they obviously don’t really do that, but they are having sex. I know this because the number of cables in the box is no longer divisible by three. And I haven’t taken any out, so they must have been up to something. Tonight I’m going to set my alarm for 3am, get out of bed, tiptoe over to the box and watch them. Like the sick cable pervert that I am. I might even wear a grey raincoat so that I really look the part.
I don’t care if anyone laughs, but I don’t want this to go on. Not under my roof.

What if these shenanigans went on unchecked? Before I know it my house would be awash with extra cables. They would worm their way into my sock drawer, around my loo roll and gently squeeze the life out of every living creature within their grasp. That’s how bad it could get.

Then they would begin organising. They would link arms and sing songs, demanding a bigger box. Some of the cables, probably the younger and thicker ones, would begin agitating for a new leader and swear that they would die for it. The older cables would roll their eyes and long for the days when everyone knew their place. And the paler cables….don’t even get me started on those. They think they’re so damn special.
It’s all true.

Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go and check on my cutlery. I think the spoons are dealing drugs.

In 2001, for my 30th birthday, a group of generous friends chipped in to buy me an MP3 player. None of them knew what the hell this shiny little thing was, but they knew from my not-so-subtle hints in the months leading up to the Big Day that I wanted nothing else, and the best response they could hope for if they gave me a Woolies voucher or novelty belly ring would be a polite “Gosh, thanks. You don’t mind if I keep it nicely wrapped up, do you? That way when I give it back to you for your birthday it’ll save me the trouble.”

No, I wanted the Creative Nomad. (Well, actually, I wanted the Creative Jukebox, but didn’t want to test the boundaries of the friendship that much.) So my wife, bless her, went off and bought me one with my friends’ money. And for a while it was my most treasured possession. It could hold a full 19 songs — double that, if I splashed out on an expansion card or dropped my Pink Floyd megamix from the playlist. I was in heaven. In fact, I even joined a gym so that I could show it off in public. Today it sits in the middle drawer of my desk, largely neglected and usurped by my iPod. But I can’t bring myself to throw it away.

So I love technology. But I don’t get this whole convergence thing.

Back in 1995 I acquired my first cellphone.

“Look at this,” I grunted as I pushed the wheelbarrow into the lounge. My housemate looked up from the Nintendo I’d bought him (share the love) and said: “What the hell is that?”

“It’s a wheelbarrow,” I said. “But more importantly, look what it’s carrying.” And I pointed. At the rectangular brick propped up by manuals and a spare battery.

“What’s that?”

“A phone.”

“Oh.”

And he returned to Super Mario Brothers.

Notice that his first response wasn’t “But can it take photographs?” or “Does it have a built-in GPS?” It was a phone. It phoned people when you were able to muster the strength to lift it to your ear and, using your clenched fist, were able to punch in someone’s number in the right sequence. He got that. And so did I.

Nowadays a phone is never just a phone. Nokia’s newest device, the N95, comes with a marketing campaign that brags “What computers have become”. Whose dumb idea was that? Computers haven’t become a phone any more than microwaves have become convection ovens, even if some of them claim to grill things. This is a phone trying to emulate a computer and falling way short of the mark.

Look, I’m all for efficiency. My current phone does email and it surfs the web, and when I’m away from my office I find that pretty handy. But it’s just not a computer. Computers have big screens, full keyboards and they can do a million things a phone can’t do. It’s also not an MP3 player. iPods have nifty click wheels and massive storage capacity.

I haven’t bought a gadget for a while, so I have decided to splash out on a GPS (hey, Cape Town’s a tricky place to navigate — it’s got a bloody big mountain in the middle. And if one more lentil-swilling, tie-dyed local tells me I should use the mountain to orient myself in my adopted city, then I’m going to shove a mountain goat up their arse. Or vote for Helen Zille. Same thing.) And I want a GPS, dammit — not a phone that is also a GPS when it’s not being an MP3 player or playing some screeching kid yelling “Daddy, your phone is ringing” as a ringtone (see arse-shoving rant above for how I feel about those).

Large corporates such as Sony, Nokia and Apple are genius innovators. They consistently churn out great products that make our world a better place. But somewhere they’ve lost the plot — why would they try to sell me one device that replaces four, when I would happily buy all four? Let’s stick our head into a Sony board meeting:

Head of Product Sanyan Yakamoto: Chairman-San, I have a great business proposition for you.

Chairman: Yes, Sanyan?

SY: Well Chairman-san, you know how we think we’re going to sell five million MP3 players next year, and 13-million phones? If we merged the two devices then we could sell 13-million of those instead.

Chairman: So instead of selling 18-million things you are now suggesting that we sell 13-million?

SY: Yes, Chairman-san.

Chairman: And thereby render the whole MP3 division obsolete?

SY: Right again, Chairman-san. (Sits back and basks in the glow of the praise he knows is about to come.)

Chairman: Sanyan, if you weren’t my son I’d order the samurai at the door to lop your head of with the Motorola Razr.

SY: But Chairman-san …

Chairman: No, son, I mean Sanyan-san, it’s not going to happen. Go and clear your desk and work for Apple.

See what I mean? Ludicrous, but a conversation like that must have happened at some point with a different outcome, or else we wouldn’t be seeing all these schizophrenic devices on the shelves. What are these guys thinking?

OK, I may be wrong in all this. And in 2025 when you’re buzzing down the highway to work in your toaster, you’ll be having the last laugh. But right now the converge-alists leave me cold. Now excuse me, please, my doorbell is ringing. That means my laundry is done.