Serenitology – Stop the signal before it is too late!

We never meant for things to turn out this way. We had the best of intentions, they just seem to have gotten away from us. I suppose the same could be said of any train wreck; but who would have thought ours would span the ‘verse?

When Fox cancelled Firefly we thought we’d put them in their place with the force of our coin. We bought copies of the Firefly DVD set for ourselves. We bought them for our families. We bought them for our friends. It would surprise me not to find that copies of Firefly were given to the less fortunate by the well off in those holiday times of year. It’s a shock the Salvation Army red buckets didn’t overflow during the chilled months with boxed sets of the DVDs.

The thing was, it worked. Our little rebellion brought Serenity into existance. How could we count that as anything but a victory?

Then the stats came in, and we didn’t do as well in our first week of ‘battle’ against the ‘Alliance’ of crap movies as we would have hoped. So, we took friends to the movies. We took family to the movies. We took dates to the movies.

We wanted the fight to spread. And so it did.

And now, just ten years later, those of us who considered ourselves Browncoats look at the world we formed and it looks so much like the Alliance we feared. How could we have known that it would become mandatory to buy ten copies of each new book, DVD, soundtrack and comic book? Who could have known that supporting the rebellion would have grown in scale to the point where it was the Alliance itself, with penalties for not conforming with the quota?

Who among us could have forseen that Serenitology would be birthed from our desire to keep the signal going?

Can you forgive us? We knew not what we were creating…

Think Poached

Today I decided to give in to my Gadget Addiction. I decided to buy the new 17″ PowerBook. The screen is over 30% larger than my current PowerBook (pixels, not inches) and the extra hour of battery life wasn’t going to hurt either.

Rather than drive around all day I decided to do the smart thing: I called the nearest Apple store and had them check inventory. The nearest Apple store happened to be the Bay Street store in Emeryville California. I called there at 12:53pm, found that there was one new 17″ PowerBook in stock. I would have just driven down and taken my chances that it would be waiting for me, except that the helpful person on the other end of the line offered to put it on hold for me. He explained that I wasn’t obligated and that they would hold it until close of business at 7pm. I said sure, he put me on hold again so he could grab the form, I gave him my name and he said it was on hold for me.

I didn’t head straight down, since the laptop was waiting for me. I took a shower, had a snack and posted to my blog that I was giving into my Gadget Addiction. I was at the Apple store by 3:40pm, as evidenced by my parking receipt. I walked in, took a couple of minutes to admire the display unit, and got in line. When I got to the cashier I said there was a 17″ PowerBook waiting for me, and gave them my name. He called to the back, asked for my PowerBook, said it should be on hold for me, listened and then told me they were looking for it and it might take a few minutes.

All in all I waited about twenty minutes until I got the final word. The final word was that it was gone. Someone removed the hold form from the PowerBook and sold it to another customer. He offered to check inventory at other stores, but I declined. I didn’t want to drive around the Bay Area on a Sunday afternoon chasing after a new 17″ laptop, with each successive store selling off my held laptop before I could get there. I thought I had done the smart thing by calling ahead and even putting it on hold, and if the Apple Store wasn’t going to honor my hold I was calling it quits.

I’m guessing the Apple Store employees get commissions. Otherwise, what would be the motivation for poaching my PowerBook?

Chris Knight

I use Amazon affiliate links in some of my posts. I think it is fair to say my writing is not influenced by the $0.40 I earned in 2022.