E-Commerce

I was reading the news online Saturday morning when I noticed my 7 1/2 year old computer was suddenly panting...actually it was squealing like a stuck pig.  I figured that pig squeals were probably not a good thing in a computer...so immediately logged-off and powered down.  Fired the ol' gal back up and seemed OK - but then late yesterday afternoon it happened again, the fan in the tower went batshit.

Indeed, although this is the first acute nervous breakdown of my trusty Dell, there have been numerous other aggravations that have cropped-up in the past year or so that have suggested it may be time for an upgrade.  Downloading pics is now painfully slow, for example.  And attempting to do anything but the simplest photo editing task will frequently result in a lock-up or various warnings of the "you have insufficient memory" variety.

I would have purchased a new computer some time ago if I had not been wracked by indecision.  One part of me wanted to buy a Mac which appears to be uniformly highly regarded by folks who do a lot of photography and other media stuff.  On the other hand, every time I price compare it appears that I can get a lot more machine for the money from Dell than I can from Apple.  Decisions.  Decisions.

Finally, I flipped a mental coin and it came up Dell.  Still wonder if I made the right decision - but I can at least take comfort in the fact that my current Dell still more-or-less functions after 7 1/2 years.  That's about age 140 in computer years.  Dell makes a perfectly fine product although perhaps not as elegant as their Apple cousins.  And although I would be happy to jettison Microsoft Windows I'm not sure it's worth $1500 bucks to do so which seems to be the Apple premium.

So...ordered a high end Dell with many bells and whistles as well as the latest version of Photoshop.  Put everything on my credit card.  No problem.

At 8 AM this morning my phone was ringing off the hook with a friendly computer generated inquiry from my pals at Bank of America's fraud unit regarding my "unusual" purchases of the evening before.  After much button punching I THOUGHT I communicated to my bank that everything was copacetic.

An hour later I received an email from Dell saying that my purchase was being denied and I should give my bank a call.  I did.  Only took 45 minutes or so to get through the voice mail maze and two real live people who passed me along the Bank of America food chain.  The third person finally "cleared" my account but told me that due to some very murky issue relating to the rebooting of their computer on Sunday night (sounded like COMPLETE bullshit to me) I would have to either go back and make the purchases all over again or get Dell and Adobe to resubmit the original bills.

By this time I had received three more emails from Dell and Adobe regarding my banking problem.  And after studying them carefully for no more than a half-hour or so concluded that they, as a matter of course, would resubmit the charges to Bank of America.

Tomorrow morning I will go into my Dell and Adobe online accounts and see if there is any record of my purchases.  I put the odds no better than fifty-fifty.