Murphy, you’re not going to win: How a Great Day Broke my Heart, part 2

Part 1 of this blog post appeared on Angel Ackerman’s web site, angelackerman.com, and was reposted on ParisianPhoenix.com

Yesterday, Rosie, the rose gold 13″ MacBook Air with the intel processor that Parisian Phoenix publisher Angel Ackerman bought refurbished from Apple about eighteen months ago when she decided to invest in the small press concept, took a horrible fall from the top of the stairs. You can read about that in part one of this story.

The hours before that terrible tumble, Angel and Rosie had worked on a press release for the upcoming Easton Book Festival, and included info about Larry Sceurman’s presentation of scary stories for adults at the Memorial Library of Nazareth and the anticipated “cat books” for Feline Urban Rescue and Rehab.

(And for the record, to leave the chronological nature of this story, The Valley Ledger has already posted the info and we have heard back from Lehigh Valley with Love Media.)

Before taking Rosie for attention, Angel received an email from Rachel Thompson, who contributed to last winter’s Not an Able-Bodied White Man with Money and the upcoming The FURR Itty Bitty How to Cat Book and How the FURR Flies. She will be speaking at a writers conference in Florida and sent a link to her YouTube video about it: Rachel Talking About her Genre.

So, Angel girded her loins and headed to Double Click Computers.

“I’m afraid this is an ER visit,” she said as she walked in the door and said hello to the two Scotty dogs. “Rosie fell down the stairs.”

Angel handed Rosie the MacBook Air to Mike from Double Click.

“I hope she’s okay,” he said.

“So do I,” Angel said, “but you’ll have to tell me.”

He looked perplexed for a moment. “The laptop is named Rosie.”

The initial diagnosis looked bleak. This particular model of MacBook Air needs to be completely disassembled to replace the screen. And it would cost $600, if nothing else had broken in the fall. And they needed an $89 service call fee to look at it.

“So I guess you’re selling me a new laptop,” Angel said. “But can you transfer my documents out of it into my iCloud?”

At that moment, a police officer arrives to discuss suspicious credit card activity. So one of the other employees starts messing with my computer. He thinks he needs another technician, who was supposedly pulling into the parking lot, but in the hour-plus Angel was there I never saw him.

Mike comes back, they reiterate the situation. They discuss how to get info off the computer. They tell it would probably be easier to transfer it directly to another machine if they can retrieve it.

So Angel says, “I guess I’ll go home and see if I can find another machine on Apple.com and bring it in.”

Angel learns that the transfer fee is something like $200 but if she buys a computer from them it’s more like $100.

With a strange sense of deja vu, Angel remarks, “so can someone sell me a laptop.”

Now the men shift from repair to sell mode. The base model M1 MacBook Airs are on backorder. Probably because of the manufacturing defect that Angel learned about later. Without anyone even suggesting it, Angel offers to buy the M2. Angel likes the lightweight nature of the MacBook Air. This will be her forth.

She also had to point out, several times, that not only was she a customer of Double Click, but the first computer she had serviced there was her PowerBook 165. Never heard of it? Think circa 1994. The OG laptop. Angel bought it when Apple discontinued them for newer models. She’s been a Mac devotee for almost 30 years.

Even went to MacWorld in New York in the late 1990s, with Parisian Phoenix Art Director Gayle Hendricks.

Now, Double Click is not a foot traffic kind of place. Let’s keep that in mind. Angel has agreed to buy the laptop, a LaCie 1TB back up drive, and Apple Care.

Angel asks about financing. She had at one point the Apple financing credit card, but that has surely been closed. So she signs up for financing through another card company, no interest, one year. The usual.

She starts filling out the application. The police call. Mike disappears. Someone asks again to shift to another spot, and it turns out the next customer in line is a former boss of Angel’s. One of the nice ones. They chit chat while his tab is settled.

Another employee comes out to handle the credit. They end up talking about animals and sharing cat photos.

Mike comes out. He hooks up his laptop to Rosie and the back up drive and is shocked to see less than 3 gigs of stuff Angel wants to transfer. He finds out Angel paid the service call fee, so he has a credit applied to the final balance. He transfers the data, says he’s not going to charge her to move a couple files, and finally Angel and “Midnight Angel” leave.