gah!

Now I know where all the respite facilities are for people who know even less about computers than I do: in customer service roles at your friendly local computing store(s). I went hunting for a set of USB headphones today. I already have a pair, but since they're in Perth they're not a great deal of use for Skype related activities over here. And I want to use Skype now, damnit. The idea was that I'd have a backup pair floating around when I got the ones with the blue shiny light on the side (you can tell I'm up on specs, can't you?) over.

Anyway. Westfield Belconnen seemed like a good bet since it's the biggest shopping centre here, so I wandered into Dick Smith's where the guy tells me they don't stock them, but there are two computer specialty stores outside the shopping centre that might. He also dubiously suggests Myer. I decide that wandering around gloveless and clueless in the cold air that left my fingers nearly numb after ten minutes waiting for the bus earlier is not a good idea, and traipse all the way down the other end of the centre to Myer. In retrospect, I could've bought gloves and gone outside, but if you'd been in Canberra today with the cold wind that cut through my polar fleece jacket, you'd have opted to stay in the centrally heated building too.

In Myer, the pimply attendant in the electronics department promptly discovers that they don't stock USB headphones. This, combined with the fact that he's never heard of them before, leads him to conclude that they don't exist. He then suggests that Tandy might stock my non-existent merchandise and sends me on my way.

After a short detour back to the other end of the damn fucking stupidarse rectangular building to fill a script I head to Tandy. Guess what? The salesman there hasn't heard of USB headphones either. He looks at me for a few seconds in that patronising way people look at you when they think they have to start calling the CPU the 'box part of your computer' because you won't understand anything else, and then says in a clipped Asian accent "You mean sound card?"

In the tine it took me to mentally reel off all the things I'd like to do to the people who hire these asshats, we established that he meant headphones and mic that plug into the soundcard and some other little doodad. My feet decided they would be eternally grateful if I just bought the damn headphones - the first pair anyone has actually proffered me in forty minutes of hunting - and sat down with a nice coffee until the next bus home. So that's what I did.

It's worth  bearing in mind that I'd just had blood extracted an hour or so earlier, so I was already a bit grumpy. While I wasn't in a great frame of mind afterwards, this extraction wasn't a terribly harrowing ordeal by my standards - it only took one attempt as opposed to six, and I only dry retched a little bit.

All in all, not a fun day. I'm beginning to think the people who do all their shopping online have the right idea.