can't.fool.me.

I dropped the girls off at a friends house around 4pm. They're going swimming and having dinner, so I have a couple of hours free. So exciting. I debated going for a run, but since it's hotter than hades here, I nixed that idea in favor of reading my bookclub book. I'm hosting this sunday, so I have to finish it, but I'm only on page 43 of 479. It'll happen, but it means that I'll have no social life until sunday evening. Before settling down to read, I called the hp support line- something I've been meaning to do for quite a while. My computer's overheating, and it's gotten progressively worse despite doing everything the site recommends. Today it shut itself down, and when I returned several hours later, it wouldn't start again (and it was completely cool by this point). I unplugged the battery and cord, replugged them, and then it started. Since I paid for the three year warranty, I figured I'd get my money's worth. I was first connected with susan. Since prior experience has proven that I'm always talking to someone in india (cheap labor), and susan was clearly indian, I was curious about her name. Was that an americanized version? Did her parents have hopes of coming to america and therefore gave her a name so she'd be ready? Was this some trick from hp trying to convince customers that they're really talking to someone in america, but that someone happens to be an immigrant? I wasn't sure. Susan transferred me to technical support, where I talked to javier. He was cool. He kept me on hold for quite some time while he tried to correct a problem with my warranty info. The serial number had been entered instead of the product number, and had to be fixed. He apologized for keeping me on hold, and explained that if he tried to have it fixed under the wrong number, he's lose his job. I told javier I was fine waiting, and I didn't want him to lose his job. Next came mark. Mark was also clearly indian (leading me to believe that there's a coverup going on within hp's support system), but his accent was so strong (I think that he might have had a speech problem as well) that I could barely understand him. He asked for my info again, and asked if there was any smoke coming from my computer (it took me a while to understand this- the poor guy had to repeat it three times). Then he asked how the weather was. Huh? I thought I'd misunderstood, but no, he was really asking how the weather was here. I told him it was hot and humid, although if he's in india, 95 with an oppressive dew point of 69 is probably old news. Then he asked about my weekend. It's wednesday. Smack in the middle of the week. What weekend is he talking about? Everytime he asked me something and I answered, his reply was "thank you for that." It got a little old. 52.18 mins later, Mark's having fedex send me a box that I will pack my laptop in, and drop off at a fedex delivery place. It's good that I just got the external hard drive and backed everything up since they'll likely have to erase the hard drive. Boo. It's going to be sad without my laptop for several days.