"Ye$, Ma'am? Need $ome A$$i$tance?"

One of the things that really ticks me off in life is when I see people getting taken advantage of by the unscrupulous. Just recently, I read on a friend's blog that she's having car trouble. Sounds like something really simple, like maybe a loose alternator belt. No problem. That can be fixed in about 10 minutes. But I'd bet my next paycheck that if she took it into a dealer, they'd charge her an arm and a leg for doing next to nothing. Luckily, I had her phone number nad called to give her my diagnosis.

Even if I'm wrong, if she goes in there sounding like she knows what the problem is, maybe they won't take advantage of her.

Kind of reminds me of an incident back in '93 when my boss (a blonde!) bought a new computer for her office. Being blonde, she didn't think to either ask me first or take me along. So, she came back with some 386 machine with Window$ 3 loaded on it. Unfortunately, every time she ran a program, she had to re-boot, because the machine couldn't really handle Window$.

At my insistence, she called the Raunchy Store (*wink* *wink*) where she bought it and ragged on the manager a bit. The manager tried to weasel out of it by asking if Window$ would load when she invoked it. (Of course it does! It just won't do anything else!) When she took it back to the store, I went along. That's when I got to throw a little techno-babble at the manager and remind him that if Windows loaded but would not run any programs, it wouldn't really "run". In other words, it wouldn't run Windows the way the programmers intended for Windows to run. I also reminded him of a little legal term called "implied warrant of merchantability".

She walked out with a new computer.

At least I didn't need to use my rolled-up newspaper.

(Other than the sad news about the car, though, this morning's convo was a lot of fun. I didn't make it to the party last year, so we've never met in person. But this was the next best thing. Neat.)

Update: Found out that the car trouble was no more than a broken fan belt. Sweet. I hope that didn't cost much. Found out some more good news about the general situation, too, but it's not my place to mention any of that here.