Juniorbird.com

You know what I don’t expect at Best Buy? Great customer service. You know what I just got at Best Buy? Really great customer service. Great like, they changed it from from “I’ll never buy a computer here again” bad situation to “I’ll always buy my computers here in the future.” Following in “Auros’s”:http://auros.livejournal.com/306423.html “footsteps”:http://auros.livejournal.com/304982.html, the Christmasy things to do seems to be to blog about it.
It all started when Mrs. DJ L’il Bit’s three-year-old Gateway laptop gave up the ghost. It had been getting slower and having troubles, and about 23 days ago she opened it up and the screen was black-and-white. Clearly, time for a replacement. She looked online and found a “great deal on an Acer laptop”:http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Acer+-+Aspire+Laptop+with+AMD+Athlon%26%23153%3B+Single-Core+Processor/9555769.p?id=1218127632130&skuId=9555769&st=acer; we took it home, set it up, and everything was working great.
And two days ago it all went wrong. If you know laptops, you know that the part that’s most likely to break — and most likely to break spectacularly — is the hinge. Every time you open and close the computer, all the force required to move the screen is concentrated in the hinge; when the computer’s open, the weight of the screen is concentrated in the hinge; and all of the cords that hook up the screen and webcam and anything else in the top of the computer are concentrated in the hinge. The hinge is where all the action happens!
So Mrs. DJ L’il Bit was sitting there, three-week-old laptop open on her lap, and the weight of the top just got to be too heavy for the poor hinge. And the hinge exploded. The plastic housing flew off and the top of the laptop came almost entirely free of the bottom. Some tears later, we headed on down to Best Buy to see what they could do.
At first, the thin-black-tie-and-white-shirt-ed Geek Squad guy behind the counter said he couldn’t do much for us: there was a 21-day-return period, and that was it. They’d take the computer back and get it fixed, but that would take two weeks. That was not the right answer — a brand-new computer should be replaced. So Mrs. DJ L’il Bit escalated it to the manager, and the manager fixed it all. He grabbed us a replacement and even had the Geek Squad guy swap the hard drive from the old laptop to the new one so that everything was already set up.
We were so happy, we bought the extended warranty that protects against accidental damage, drops, spills, and even replaces the battery. And you know what, I’ll probably buy my next Mac there; things go wrong, but they made it right, and that’s what counts.
(I will admit that I never thought I’d write an entry like this about Best Buy, but good for them!)

If you say “1980s movie character archetype,” maybe you come up with John Rambo, or Ferris Bueller, or Charlie Sheen in _Wall Street_ — America kicking ass, America growing up, America getting rich — but the ultimate character archetype of the ’80s for me is someone with a lot less hair, a lot more coiled rage, a lot more cool. Let’s face it, the ’80s were all about Louis Gossett Jr. And the ’90s, for every Brad Pitt or tight-lipped Robert Pattinson, there’s the standard: all the cool, none of the rage, it’s George Clooney.
For those of you whose late elementary school hopes and dreams weren’t defined by _Iron Eagle_, here’s how it works: whether in _An Officer and a Gentleman_ or _The Principal_, ol’ Lou was a hard-working, professional guy who’d already given everything, but had to do buck authority and put it all on the line one more time to save his country, plus teach someone to grow up while he did it. None of that Bud Fox crap could’ve happened without some Louis Gossett Jr. in the background making things safe for big shoulders and suitcases of money, physically and existentially.
As for Clooney, in the go-go early part of the century, he played Danny Ocean, the perpetual kid (Danny?!?!) who looked great, lived high, and did it all just by moving one pile of money back and forth between two locations. Now that reality has blown the top off of that whole business model, he’s been re-invented, playing an archetype for the post-AIG era in _The Men Who Stare at Goats_ and _Up in the Air_.
Clooney plays the same archetype — different character, but same archetype — in both movies. In _Goats_, he was in a special psychic army unit in the ’70s, drummed out for doing his job well but falling afoul of the right people; now he’s come back to join Ewan McGregor in a journey through Iraq to reveal the truth. In _Up in the Air_ — which, despite the trailers, seems to feature no music by Iggy Pop at all — he’s a consultant who did his job perfectly and lived his life the way he wanted (alone), but is suddenly confronted with a new, Web-only way to do his job and a new girl who makes him want to settle down. In both, Clooney’s an example of past success in a new world, challenged to change, with the dark question in the background of whether or not there’s anything he can change into that matters in what’s to come.
Other actors in both movies actually outshine Clooney — particularly Jeff Bridges in _Goats_ and Vera Farmiga in _Up in the Air_. But that’s fine, because Clooney is now the everyman who provides the basis for all of society, not some Danny Ocean who provides all the flash. And with his salt-and-pepper hair and deep, basset hound eyes, Clooney’s perfect for the part. He’ll be heading off into the sunset, all Alan Ladd on a horse, in movie after movie now; except there’ll be no little kid running after him; that was the archetype of the ’50s. Our new character heads off into the sunset alone, and society moves in its own direction, and that’s just how it is.
And you should see these movies, that’s just how that is.