Thursday, September 20, 2007

Brownie Points


There exists in every relationship an invisible yet entirely tangible system of keeping track of who has more ‘brownie points’. A sort of good tempered keeping of the score if you will, a tongue-in-cheek weighing up of how either of you has performed or outdone the other recently. You know what I mean. He remembers my favourite Chanel moisturiser for my birthday: 5 brownie points. I find a shop that sells an obscure book he’s wanted for ages and surprise him with it: 10 brownie points. He gives me a shoulder rub after too many hours behind the computer: 8 brownie points, and so on. Well today I CASHED IN BIG!
This story starts way back in October 2006 when hubby finally, after more than a year of deliberating and pouring over geek magazines, bought himself a Nokia PDA. Basically a home pc the size of a chocolate bar, this thing is supposed to be able to everything but bake a cake. With great anticipation and quivering with excitement, hubby sat down behind the laptop to hook up his Nokia, install the software and synchronise the two machines. I wisely retreated out of reach adn hearing range.
Some time later hubby emerged, flushed and not very cheerful to say the least. He couldn’t get the software to install and the bloody thing wouldn’t talk to our computer. This was the start of nearly A YEAR of frustration with this gadget. Tense, terse and eventually downright snarly emails were exchanged between the Nokia Nerds and hubby but to no avail. In disgust he thrust it into my hands last month and said I could use it as a mobile phone since I didn’t like my current one anyway. Defeat most dreadful.

Well yesterday I started thinking about how disappointed hubby was and so took it upon my self to have a crack at figuring out what was going wrong. First port of call: the Nokia Nerd helpline and a long conversation involving several software doewnloads from their website punctuated with multiple laptop re-starts. Some of you may find these anonymous helpdesk calls daunting, but I have some experience in this field: when we purchased our first Dell pc years ago I once spent over two hours talking to the amiable “Sean-from-Dublin-how-you-doin-today” and then another two hours with “Jim, from Texas, ma’am” while completely reformatting the damn thing and re-installing the sound and video cards from the internet - in the days before cable. After that experience, I feel bullet proofed, baby.
This morning however, lacking the stamina and mental fortitude of either Sean or Jim, my Nokia Nerd gave up and suggested I head downtown to the Nokia Help Centre at Wheelock Place. Sadly I wasted an hour of my time there, with the final advice being to remove all software (again!) and reinstall the software from the cd whcih was delivered with the pda. As if this wasn’t the first thing we tried.
Home again, I decided to gave it one last shot….


…and it worked! I’ve got that sucker up and running and singing to my laptop like they’re the best of friends. Now if that doesn’t add up to a mountain of brownie points, I don’t know what does! That’s if hubby ever wants to have his PDA back again, of course.

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