Serendipity
Our stop in Hong Kong started out pretty slow. We spent a couple days wandering around the city and doing our part to help the global economy. After 5 months on the road, we needed to replace a few clothes and this is certainly the city for shopping. You can get just about anything here from a $500 Coach bag to a $5 Goach one.
It also turned out to be the perfect city for a little bad news/good news. When we were in India, my stomach wasn’t the only thing that picked up a bug. Our USB memory stick also caught something bad. When our anti-virus software tried to remove it, the stick was left inaccessible. What better place to get a new one than Sim City in the electronics market district? As we made our way through the booths selling cameras, memory, cell phones, headsets, and all manner of e-stuff, we noticed a few computer repair shops too.
Fast forward a few hours to the end of the day back at the hotel… Eric decides to check email, but the laptop is making a strange noise and doesn’t start. Panic. Anger. Despair.
We grabbed the laptop and headed back to Sim City. After a quick consultation with a shop owner who spoke excellent English, he opened up the PC and started to diagnose our problems. The mother board had died, but the hard drive seemed OK. He quickly copied all our files over to a memory stick for backup and presented us with some options… “Order a new board – it will only take 3 days.” Unfortunately we are leaving today, so that was out.
He stopped to think and then got on his mobile. After a 10 minute conversation in Chinese, he hung up and told us the “good” news. There was another shop in Sim City that had a refurbished laptop exactly like ours. We could go buy that one and swap out our hard drive with all our data and programs (and iTunes!) on it. Within 90 minutes the transplant was complete and walked out of the shop with a working PC. We even sold the old one back to them (I’m sure they have it running and for sale again by Monday).
It was a costly day, but where else in the world could you get this problem fixed so quickly, and at 7PM at night? We were back in time to catch the end of happy hour at the hotel.
Here’s the patient on the operating table:
halftime
April 10th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
That’s amazing! Having a Taiwan brand laptop must’ve helped too.
April 12th, 2009 at 8:22 pm
There certainly is something to be said about service.
April 13th, 2009 at 11:20 am
Looks like my desktop last week. But here in the states, it took me 5+ days to get it properly patched up and off the ventilator. I now have a new motherboard, new power supply, and a new hard drive. Can’t live without ’em.