A new electronic era...

I remember when the Commodore 64 came out. Upon learning it had 64K of memory, I gasped. 64K! Luxury! How much memory can one person possibly need? And augmented by a floppy disk drive, with yet more space to be filled? No more waiting for clunky cassette tape loads? It was almost frightening.
We've transferred most of the essentials over from our last computer -- just in time, too, as I thought I saw it starting to smoke -- and now we're left with only 142 gigabytes of space left on the hard drive, and 504 megabytes of RAM. We'll be sooooo close to running out of space...in the year 4076.
We got this thing at the MDG store. The process was relatively painless, all told, but I really didn't like the salesperson very much.
To be fair, that wasn't...entirely...his fault. I have impossibly high standards for salespeople. In some stores, I want immediate assistance. In others, I want the hired help to leave me the hell alone. And they're supposed to know just from looking at me what kind of store I've found myself in.
Computer salespeople, in particular, should avoid the hard-sell techniques this guy was up to. We''d already decided on the system we wanted before we even opened the door, so we didn't appreciate discussing the merits of all the other (invariably more expensive) systems at length.
Nor do we like smooth, slick, and smarmy salesmen (they're always men: women can be smooth, even slick, but 'smarmy' is beyond the double-x chromosome, for some reason.)
That's not to say women are exempt from my harsh view of salespeople. The woman who procured our mortgage, besides neglectiing to mention several very pertinent pieces of information, acted as if she was our long-lost best friend, who had lived every experience and shared every hope and dream we'd ever entertained. Instant turn-off.
Men in sales, though, tend to act superior to their customers. You get the feeling that if you're not going to spend a substantial amount of money, they're not going to notice you. If you exhibit a little knowledge, they'll drown you in theirs.
Okay, MDG guy, you have the bigger dick. Mine droops in defeat. Happy now?
But I'll give the slick guy some credit, because he sold us a slick system. We're running Windows XP Media Center, which is apparantly very good. The computer is running at 2.93 gigahertz...which is insanely fast compared to the old clunker. And the 17" flat screen monitor is just amazing. My eyes aren't bugging out of my head anymore.
Now there are 43 email messages waiting to be examined. So off I go. Zip!