Mercury Retrograde? Or Just a Lemon Laptop?
Technically, Mercury is ‘retrograde’ now. It stationed and started appearing to move backwards from our perspective on Earth (obviously the planet is not literally moving backwards) on November 16thand will station and ‘go direct’ again on December 6th. When this happens, which it does three or four times per year, I think, the astrological lore is that many things associated with communication, electronics, appliances, etc., go on haywire, or are easily messed up somehow.
It is generally recommended that one not sign contracts during a period of Mercury retrograde, nor purchase electronics or other appliances – and it’s quite possible that wires of communications will get crossed and misunderstandings can abound. Phone calls drop more easily, emails don’t go through, etc., etc.
Interestingly enough, Sunday night, as I was putting the final touches on my post for that night, the screen on my Dell laptop started flickering. I immediately felt that queasy feeling. I’d seen this before. It stopped, and I completed what I was writing, hoping maybe I’d imagined that <<flicker>>.
I’d been down at the cabin and I had to get home so I could connect to the internet to publish the post. When I opened up my laptop here at home – oh my. The screen was fritzing into bands of gray pixels, then yellow band with jagged edges of orange and yellow, then bands of blue. (Even though it wasn’t, it looked like it should be making a crackly, hissy, zzzt zzzt noise.) The screen would revert back to showing the desktop, but little lightning like dots were randomly darting here and there and it was clear to me that it was rapidly losing its mind, so I frantically emailed myself the two posts I’d written that day. I was determined to neither lose those posts nor miss my deadline. The cursor literally froze in place after I hit <<send>>.
Lucky for me, we have another laptop and I was able to file that post before midnight.
On Monday, I called Dell’s premium support desk and ended up spending over five hours on the phone with them, during which they put both my computer and me through our paces. I was surprised when the technician took a snippy attitude with me; he acted a bit patronizing and assumed a couple of times that what I was reporting happening or seeing on the screen wasn’t so.
After five straight hours working on the machine together, he did something to it remotely that would take about two hours to complete. He said he would call me back to see if it successfully resolved the issue.
It did not. My tech did not call me back personally. Instead, “Joel” called me, saying my tech was on another call. Joel sounded chagrined that the procedure had not worked, put me on hold, and told me my tech would call me back at 11:00 a.m. EST Tuesday (yesterday) morning.
He did not.
In fact, NO ONE from Dell premium support (such as it is) called me yesterday. Naturally, I waited around for several hours. I need my laptop. (And no, I only have an 800 # for Dell – the techs call us; we don’t call the techs.) NOT ONE CALL. MY LAPTOP IS DEAD.
Oh, and did I mention this exact same thing happened in September? After spending hours and hours on the computer that time, they made me SEND IT IN to Dell (even though I have on-site service), and – a week later – told me there was nothing wrong with it. They did a total reset of my computer (all my programs had to be reinstalled), but there was nothing wrong with it. Right.
And now it was happening again, two months later.
As I said, they did not have the courtesy to call me back yesterday after taking up over five hours of my time on Monday and failing to fix it.
Today, I was in a session all day. My phone was on silent, as I was with a client. There was ONE phone call from Dell: at 1:52 p.m. At 1:55 p.m., this guy had the unmitigated temerity to write me an email saying that he had “tried unsuccessfully to reach me” and since he didn’t get through to me, he was “archiving my service request.”
Can you see the steam coming out of my ears?
I thought I didn’t have anything to write about tonight. And I obviously didn’t have anything thoughtful to share.
But be aware of Mercury retrograde. Ha. Or crappy “premium” service by Dell.
Happy Thanksgiving Eve – and my apologies for being a crank.
I’m just grateful we have a MacBook Air in the house.