Friday 18 March 2005

computer

I ordered my PC last Saturday night, as I mentioned. Anyway, they shipped it separately, one package of bits with Chronopost and the box with La Poste. The latter came past my place on Wednesday, and I stayed home to collect it, but the former arrived Tuesday, when I was at work, so I couldn't go get it. As such, I had to head over to their pickup office to get it.

Now, their web site showed an address and a map for this office, out at St Jacques de la Lande, so I hiked out there Wednesday arvo. This is black stump territory, really sparse, really depressing, really not where i wanted to go or be. This was exaggerated by the fact that a half hour of wandering confirmed that their office was categorically not where they had drawn it on the map. A quick check of the map that night and a subsequent trip back Thursday morning confirmed that neither was it at the address they had given, a kilometre or two away. Thursday evening Franck drove me out, and we eventually tracked down both the building and, eventually, a way to get to it. But they forgotta the package. Couldn't find it. Anyway, a fourth trip soon sorted that out, this morning, all very quick and painless. As far as fourth attempts go.

Anyway, I have all the bits of a machine now except a QWERTY keyboard. Every shop selling keyboards in Rennes is lined with boxes emblazoned with pictures of QWERTY keyboards, but in a strange, false advertising type twist, they all contain AZERTY keyboards, a bizarrely irrational french design in which you have to hold down shift to get the numbers, and even hold down alt for other characters like "@". Anyway, no keyboard yet.

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