Woke up again early, around 06:30 and watched a bit of TV, then out for coffee and a ham sandwich with my dad because mum wasn’t feeling well.
Dad has been asking me all kinds of technical questions because I know stuff about technology and he has just about mastered the TV remote control.
He’s after a new laptop so we went to the local PC World to pick one out. He only uses it for email and Skype so I picked a cheap Acer. The assistant went off to find it and was gone for ages. He eventually came back with one but I could tell that there was going to be a ‘but…’ . Sure enough, he said they couldn’t find a new one, but he had one that was the same model that had been opened and set up that they usually charge 35 pounds for but he would let us have it for just 25 pounds. I asked what the set-up entails, and he said “We turn it on…”. After I’d finished laughing he continued – “we set up a user account and we back up the settings to a USB drive that you get to keep”. I said take the USB drive back and we’ll take the laptop for the advertised price, and did you really say that you charge 35 pounds to turn it on? He said he couldn’t do that so I said he could either sell it to us for the advertised price of 280 pounds or we’d just go to another shop, because I am not going to pay 25 pounds for a set up that includes ‘turning it on’. He went to consult his manager and came back and said it was fine, and I told him if I needed help turning it on I’d come back and pay him the 25 pounds.
Got it home, managed to find the ‘on’ button and spent 30 minutes uninstalling all the bloatware that they had installed as part of the setup. We also got to keep the USB drive.
Out for dinner with my brothers and family.