I dare you to try. So this morning I drove from my girlfriend’s house to my house and upon arriving home and trying to get to work I realized I had left my power cord for my MacBook Pro at her place. I had about 20 minutes of juice left in my laptop, not nearly enough to get any actual work done for the day. So I decided that the best thing to do was to go buy a second power cord, that way I would have one at my place, one at her place, and with $80 the problem would be solved forever. Easier said than done.

Best Buy
I first drove to the local Best Buy, which is just down the street. I have a $100 Best Buy gift card, so I figured that would be perfect. I also wanted to pick up the AirPort Extreme wifi router to bump up the wifi coverage in my apartment. Sweet, I thought, I’ll go pick up both and use my gift card and the world will be dandy. I walk into the store, go straight to a worker guy and say “I need a powercord for my MacBook Pro.” He looks at the shelf, then goes and gets a ladder and checks the nether regions of the top shelf area, then finally returns to me to tell me that they’re supposed to have them in stock but they don’t. OK, fine, then just give me an AirPort Extreme thingy so I can at least use this stupid giftcard. He checks the computer… they have none in stock. OK, so Best Buy is totally useless, I might try to sell my giftcard on Craigslist.

Apple Store
I figure if there’s any place that will have a power cord for my laptop it’s the Apple store in downtown San Francisco. I mean, they HAVE to have power cords, it’s the frickin’ Apple store after all. So I take BART downtown and go into the Apple store. I walk up to an Apple employee and say “I need a powercord for my MacBook Pro.” “Sorry, we only have powercords for the 13 inch MacBooks. The other ones have been on backorder for the last month.” WTF?! This is the god damn Apple store. Your only job is to sell products from one company. You don’t even make that much shit. And now you’re telling me you don’t even have the most basic, essential accessory for one of your main products? They did in fact have the AirPort Extreme in stock, and I thought about buying one right there, since I was in the store. Then I realized… fuck no, this stupid Apple store isn’t getting any of my money today. I’ll probably turn around and order this stuff online tomorrow, but today they don’t get a dime.

CompUSA
On a tip from the Apple store woman I go over to CompUSA, which is just down the street. I walk straight up to a guy and say “I need a powercord for my MacBook Pro.” He tells me that they have the powercords for the 13″ MacBooks, but the other ones have been on backorder for over a month (yeah, I’m starting to get the picture). Fine, ok, no power cord. I gotta get some work done today, so what to do? I half jokingly say, “OK, well what if I just buy a new MacBook Pro and return it tomorrow?” He then tells me that there’s a 15% restocking fee. The funny part is that I actually do the calculation in my head. Let’s see, the laptop costs around $2,000, so 15% is $300. So the total price of the power cord would come out to $380, but I would be able to get to work. After considering it for a second I realize that that passes my threshold for getting ripped off and I walk out the store, all the while eyeing the display MacBook Pros and trying to figure out how easy it would be to swipe a power cord without getting caught. It also occurs to me that I think Best Buy has a chiller return policy, so the buying a new laptop for a day scenario might work over there. But I decide it would be too much of a headache.

So now I’m back at my girlfriend’s place. After a half day of running around San Francisco and two trips across the Bay Bridge (no traffic in the morning, then bumper to bumper around noon, wtf?), I can finally get some work done. Whew, ranting felt good.