under promise, over deliver

When we started Code to Customer, Oliver and I decided that it would be hard, no, scratch that, impossible to be productive workers without brand new MacBook pros.

So we’ve treated ourselves! Yes, they are suitably shiny and super-quick.

There’s a bit of a saga behind the purchase. First of all, we walked into Magnum Mac, on Vivian Street. We’d just been paid, and we wanted our computers yesterday.

I don’t think I’ve ever been given worse service. The guy was completely out of it, we had to actually find him and force him to help us. We made sure he knew that we were a guaranteed sale (and not a small one either) but he seemed determined to drive us away. He made no eye contact, seemed sleepy and disinterested, and he knew nothing about the hardware he was supposedly selling.

His manager, or someone I assumed was his manager, was filling shelves close by, and aside from yelling across to fill in his somewhat gappy knowledge occasionally she didn’t seem too worried about helping him out. So we left, secure in the knowledge that we wouldn’t be back.

And to the Apple Store it was! (I wonder if Magnum Mac mind - do they still get some revenue from the Apple Store in New Zealand?).

The experience here was awesome. We customised, tweaked and configured to our heart’s content, and soon we had the perfect pair of MacBook Pros. Apple sent us an email, letting us know they’d be shipped out in the next week, and then arrive by the 14th of July. Not instant, but not too bad given our inherent hacker’s need to “adjust”.

I’m sitting here typing this on the 3rd of July, fully two weeks before we intended to get anything. We ordered on a Friday, Apple emailed us on Sunday to let us know they’d finished and had handed everything over to TNT.

So we headed on over to the (somewhat confusing) TNT shipment tracker, and refreshed every couple of hours. Fingers were crossed that we wouldn’t share Lance’s TNT experience.

But, despite an entry on the tracker reading “Incorrect and/or incomplete address entered” and a brief (weird?) stopoff in Hong Kong on their way from Shanghai, our new “work tools” arrived in a timely fashion this morning.

I’m still savouring the new-apple-product smell.