Yesterday, the boss and I go out to buy a hose for our place down on the face of the Sierra Madre Oriental. In the meantime, we decide to relent and actually spend some money...this time on a slightly fancier than basic digital camera. We find one that looks like it came out of a Barbie Goes on Tour box, buy the accompanying thing that has to be put inside so as to record the pictures, and off we go.
Yes...it is true...I am also a mendacious malcreant. We saw that the Barbie Camera was "made in (red) China" and we saw the form that we had to mail to Peking with the blood-types of our children and grandchildren...(they do not want geezers like us as organ donors for their princeling selcct - 0 - sex children).... and we went on our way. We noticed that even the Kodak device that a person has to put insidee the camera to record the pictures (the name escapes me right now...something like a gaga or blintz)....was also made in (red) China. That form requires a tissue sample to be mailed in within thirty days or all warranties are off.
In any regard, we arrive at our abode and begin the relatively simple process of bringing the little camera to life. There is the instructive CD, which El Gringo Viejo puts in....and starts up. The inevitable happens...there is an announcement mid-way though the set up that says that are are some kind of incompatibility issues...so therefore click here, and shut down and restart. This is done, like a good prole and worshipper of Chairman Mao, and off we go again...this time arriving at the point where the CD asks to select which model of camera is being set-up. It gives about 100 different models made by the same company. And, of course, the model type and number of the camera is not found on the list of choices.
El Gringo Viejo makes the mistake of selecting the nearest model designation and number, and it seems to satisfy the CD and the computer and Chairman Mao. We make it to the end, and close out. Before fifteen minutes have gone by, El Gringo Viejo's computer has gone bi-polar. It is strategereising what it should be misunderestimating and it is confusing the Taiwanians with the Germanians.
We lose a bit of some of our posts, and also....shrrreeeeeiiiiikkkkkk!!!!!....access to our favourites.
We disengage the material that has been put in by the Red Chinese CD, pack up everything and take it back to the Target Store to advise the lowest level clerk that she is complicit in a great worldwide conspiracy involving the American version of the Ruhr Valley Capitalists, George Soros, the Annenberg Foundation, the United Nations, and a Chinese communist control group...but she just pushes and little button under the counter. Suddenly 31 men in black with sunglasses and funny Frank Sinatra hats (also black), rush us and take away our neat little pile of merchandise, packaging material, Kodak stuff....then thrust an already processed return of credit receipt into our hands and pretty much herd us out of the busy Target Store...(aka Red Chinese Junk Redemption Centre). They also gave us two coupons for 20 yankee dollars each for Ho Che Wonh Bak Mati Zahnua Chinese Restaurant. We found out later that the name of the place, roughly translated means:
All our personnel came here in the metal overseas shipping crates and are members of the Chinese Peoples' Liberation Army. They are here as moles awaiting orders to begin beheading all round-eye, mountains of dung, and to carry off their children and grandchildren to Peking in order to be interred in the Chairman Mao Organ Donor Clinic for the Children and Grandchildren of Great Chinese Communist Party Ruling Council and General Officers of the Peoples' Liberation Army. We give the term "Chinese take-out" a whole new meaning, white fascist dog.
We came back and fiddled a bit more with our magic box here, and then it began to work predictably again.
We are looking for a camera made in Swaaziland or Tetanusia-Gangrenia...or, heck, even the gun free zone of the Peoples' Republic of New York. We drag our knuckles back into the cave, ever mindful of the goodness of our readers who indulge us.
El Gringo Viejo
