Jane meets The Geek

Victoria, Texas’ one and only mall now boasts a brand new Best Buy store.

Have you been to a Best Buy lately? Know about the “Geek Squad?” These are employees who both sell computers and electronic equipment, including answering customers’ dumb questions in language they (the customers) don’t understand, and repair/set up/adjust this equipment for customers either at the store or in their homes.

Yesterday evening our friend who I'll call Jane asked me to go with her to the new Best Buy and help her pick out a computer. She’d had an old machine (first-generation Pentium with little RAM and maybe a 2-gig hard drive) that bit the dust some months ago. She’d been saving up and was ready to take the plunge and buy.

She had shopped at Sam’s club and the Office Max and Office Depot stores in town, and had narrowed her choices down to three models. On the strength of the spec sheets, I told her that one of the three was not in the same league as the other two. She dropped it out of the race. The info she had on the Best Buy model was incomplete, so we went in together to take a look.

We were greeted by a young man who announced with pride that he was a geek, a member of the Geek Squad! I had trouble keeping a straight face.

This guy had thick black hair down to his hips! WAIT! I know—long hair is okay. But when he lisped describing the capabilities of a particular model as creating “a gamer’s paradise” I had to turn my head!

To his eternal credit, he DOES know his computers. He told me MUCH more than I understood about why this particular processor didn’t need a high powered video card to produce true colors, and yada, yada.

Well, Jane decided that was the model for her (all she needs is something to run an internet browser, email, Word and Excel, for Pete’s sake!) so we hauled all the boxes to her car.

Yes, I have a date Friday evening to set it all up for her, load some productivity software, get her connected to the internet, and so on. I told her it will probably take more than one evening to get it all done, but we’ll see.

If she ever needs help with any of it later and I’m not around, she can always call the Geek Squad!

(Btw, the last 20 inches or so of his hair was braided. It really wasn’t a bad look!)