IRREVERENT Magazine - Features

I was gazing one day around the offices of R.A. Enterprises and it occurred to me that our computer system had the air of the abacus about it.  That is to say that the crap beige plastic had turned yellow from the fluorescent lighting and the manuals all boasted top of the line 1 GB hard drives.  "How the hell will we support a triumphant return to IRREVERENT with this load of junk?" I queried to no one in particular.  Actually I queried it of someone quite specific:  Vaclav Herçek the IT equivalent of R. A. Enterprises' Legal Samurai Mr. Suntori.

"Vell ve can't,"  he replied.  "I've zeen zere operation.  Its A1 top notch."  Which goes a long way toward explaining why American business should reconsider off-shoring tech support.  After all you get what you pay for.  Still, I knew that while IRREVERENT HQ was just banging rocks together, R.A. Enterprises might as well be counting on toes.  "Fix it," I said, "and now."  Little did I know that the experience of upgrading would reveal to me a scam of such epic proportions that "bait and switch" looks like a game for babies.

It's at this point that Mr. Suntori raises his shark like head and reminds me that I need to be careful about naming any specific companies, like, say, Gateway or Dell, in connection with the charge of engaging in bait and switch routines.  He's right of course.  None of these major computer system builders is, in fact, baiting and switching because that would be illegal. Instead, they're trading on confusion and mystery, in other words, good marketing.  Dell, for example, runs a different sale every week.  One week they offer a free quadruple memory upgrade (apparently there was a bumper memory harvest), the next it's a 17 in (be sure to mention the viewable image size or its class-action time all over again) LCD monitor.  As for Gateway, well let's just say that if you haven't blown your brains out in frustration while using their website, then you've been sucking down more Oxy than Rush Limbaugh.  For both behemoths, the net result is that you never know whether you'll get a better deal if you wait a week or if you pull the trigger now.  

So let's say that you pull the trigger and, even before your system arrives, the 160 GB hard drive you spent $200 on is suddenly free. "Surely," you say, "Dell will price protect me."  Not so fast jefe (and don't call me Shirley).  The following is from Dell's own website, buried, oddly enough, in their customer service forums:  

You have 30 days from your invoice date to call Dell and request that a price protection be run on your system. Although this is not a Dell policy, it is a courtesy that Dell provides. If the overall price of your system drops over $50, Dell will credit back the difference to your original form of payment. Promotions and special offers are not included when the price protection rebate is run (emphasis mine). The price protection is a one time offer. If you don't believe me, check this out

After running the above through Mr Suntori's Legalese Mumbojumbolator^TM we discovered that every single upgrade Dell offers is a "Promotion".   You've got no hope of getting your money back, chuckles.  The thing that really sucks, and the thing that helps Dell make money by the bucketfull, is that they offer some of the best priced, most configurable systems going.  Trust me, I've looked at them all.  Of course I lost consciousness halfway through navigating the Moo Cow website at Gateway, but it seemed that a comparably featured Holstein box was about $500 more than the bastards at Dell were getting. "Dude we've got you by the Dells"

All of which brings me to the most despicable part of this whole operation:  the complete inability to effectively compare systems offered by these two IT giants. You see with the mixture of CPU's, memory packages, hard drive sizes, monitors, and software prices it's absolutely impossible to compare systems from two different manufacturers.  This means that each company is competing with, and price protecting against ITSELF.  No wonder Dell will deign to return your lettuce only in the event the marketing department, in a heroic effort to be outsourced en masse, lowers the base price more than $50.  And don't think that you're going to get any relief by avoiding these two Intel whores and moving to a fine Athlon system.  The only Athlon boxes as completely configurable as the Dude and Moo Cow systems are put together by NoNamé Associates, and good luck getting warranty work done by those Yu-Gi-Oh playing  bastards.  

"Who cares?" you might be thinking, "I'll just build my own computer."  Well, go ahead and dust off your copy of Build Your Own PC for Lobotomy Patients.  That's the book you bought when you thought you might get your A+ Certification and join the secure high...paying...Ha!Ha!Hee!Hee!Hee! (You're right Suntori, I couldn't do it with a straight face) IT industry.  Just remember that the main players buy their components in bulk and the component manufactures know upon which cheek the money shot falls.   The mother board you buy for $200 costs them about $30, meaning that by the time you're done rolling your own  you'll see a price tag of about two grand.  That figure doesn't even account for the fact that even as a Lobotomy Patient your time is infinitely more valuable than the 6 year old in Calcutta putting together Compaqs.

So what's a body to do?  Luckily your best friend in the whole universe is here with official Avuncular Advice^® on tap.  After weighing the pros and cons, spending innumerable hours on the internet, and, finally, Trumping a couple of interns who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, I came to the following conclusion:  don't upgrade.  That's right bucko, I checked out of the whole upgrade brouhaha and you can too.  The little machine I'm knockin' around right now handles all the work I personally need to do, and my employees can get their own units (the operative word for those as complain is "unreimbursed business expense deduction." AKA the fuck 'em clause).   I would advise that you do the same.  Let's face it, the rag you're reading right now doesn't have the hard earned to do anything that would tax the memory of an Apple II.  If you need a computer for anything other than reading IRREVERENT, then you probably shouldn't be reading it in the first place.  Now get back to work.