Creative Entrepreneurship

A week or two ago, I was having the rare trouble with my Macbook that I was contemplating rebooting my hard drive to fix any bugs.  It was worth blogging about at the time while it was fresh, but I didn't have time and didn't get around to it until today.

Since my Leopard disc seems to be scratched or something, I couldn't get it to finish rebooting past the 17% mark, so I decided to suck it up and finally upgrade to Snow Leopard since $30 is not going to break the bank for me like if it were priced similarly to Leopard.

So I first to go to this building near my house--I forget the nickname for it--but it's like a tower of just computer related stores.  I get to the Mac Reseller, and see a box of Snow Leopard in the display, and ask how much it costs.  They told me 80 soles (about $27 US give or take).  So I state I'd like to buy one, and the guy then explains to me that they can't actually sell it to me; it's only bootleg copies they have, and that it costs 80 soles for them to install it for me on my hard drive.  I really didn't want to buy a bootleg copy, but I was more interested in buying the disc than merely paying to have them install it for me, when presumably I'd probably need to reinstall again it in the future.  But I wasn't surprised that they'd be selling a bootleg copy in Peru.  So instead of actually selling me the product, they wanted me to pay the same price to have them install it on my computer and keep the product--a bootleg at that.  No thanks.

So I suck it up and take a taxi out to Jockey Plaza where the iStore is, and upon getting there, find out they're sold out of Snow Leopard, and won't have in stock sent from the USA until the second week of February.  So I linger around and I'm looking at other products because--if the price was right--I could use a thing or two.  As soon as I realize the guy at the 'genius bar' has nothing to do, I pull out my laptop and explain to him the problem I was having with my computer--the browsers all didn't work, but would freeze after about 30 seconds of usage, making it practically impossible to do anything useful on the computer and that I didn't desire to wait until February to fix this if he knew the solution.  He didn't.  Some genius. 

So he runs some kind of test by plugging in a hard drive through my USB port and it shows nothing wrong with my computer--and by now I've got two people waiting in line behind me with iPod touches.  So he encourages me to sign into my Windows partitioned drive, and see if I have problems with the browser in Windows mode.  I sign in, and of course, no problem.  Other than the internet working slower than molasses being poured in January in Northern Canada, I have no problem.  But at this point I'm out of sight out of mind and the 'genius' is no longer giving me any kind of attention...for an hour.  I finally force him to look at my computer and he tells me "well, I don't know what the problem is".

At this point, he offers to install Snow Leopard for me--for 200 soles!  I asked him whether if he did that, would I be able to come in February and pick up a copy of Snow Leopard for free having 'paid' for it today as part of him installing it on my hard drive.  He said he doubted it, but I could wait for the boss to come in later that day who was supposed to be there any minute.  I waited another half hour and when it was obvious I was wasting my time, I tried reasoning with the 'genius' again, and of course, he was too afraid of giving me a definitive answer about paying MORE than what the disc cost, even though I was leary of not actually getting the disc.

Gotta love this culture's entrepreneurial spirit:
"Senor, we'd love to install it for you and have you pay more than it costs, but not actually give you what you came here for-- a disc!"

Anyway, that's my latest cultural experience to share.  It reminds me of things I take for granted when in North America, where I can just go get something, as opposed to living in a third world country where I have to wait for leftovers to be shipped here and then sold overpriced to cover the import costs.

Anyway, check out Apple's Epic Fail = the iPad.  The Failblog posted this the very day the announcement was made.  I can't help but wonder if Apple even has any women working for its marketing department who could have warned them to come up with a better name?