God Bless America!
Saturday, 10th September, 2005
I've travelled to L.A. five or six times over the last three years, and always before with British Airways. This time I used Air Miles to fly with Virgin Atlantic, and have to say the service was superb, and the sort of service one used to experience on British Airways many years ago before cut price marketing reduced profit margins and staff salaries. From now on Virgin Atlantic will be my first choice, not my second.
The flight left and arrived an hour later than it was supposed to, even though all passengers were boarded in plenty of time, thanks to 'congestion' at Heathrow aiport. I have yet to ever leave Heathrow at the scheduled time - it is ALWAYS congested!.
Alas, I discovered in the airport lounge that I managed to leave my spare battery for the laptop at home in the usual last-minute packing. This means I'm restricted to 4-5 hours/day note taking instead of the hoped-for 9 to 10, and most of Saturday was spent in a failed attempt to locate a replacement locally in the States.
Susan, who collected me at the airport, took me to a computer store, Fry's, to try and purchase a new battery, en route to San Diego. It was very hard to resist using the credit card to buy all manner of new toys! Imagine a store the size of the UK's largest PC World warehouse and then multiply that by a factor of 10 or 20. The number of products was staggering. Alas, it seems my laptop is too new for batteries to be in anything approaching reasonable supply. The national Fujitsu company customer service/sales line proved even worse - claiming first that they didn't sell the laptop here ( despite many US web sites advertising it), then that the battery part numbers would be different (they're not), then saying they could supply the battery but with only a 75% certainty of delivery for Tuesday, which when pushed became advice along the lines of they couldn't really say when it would arrive and I'd be better not to order it. Apparently Fujitsu aren't a major PC supplier here. If my experience was anything to go by, I'm not surprised. Their customer 'service' sucks just as much here as most company's help lines do back home.
One thing that DOESN'T suck here is the prices of computer equipment and accessories. A UKP139 battery from the UK is USD119 here - less than half the price. No wonder pundits keep talking about 'Rip off Britian'. A quick check of some laptop prices with the current exchange rate frequently revealed costs about a third of that being offered by the so-called discount warehouses in the UK. Hard not to get out the credit card and go a bit crazy! However I resisted the temptation to buy more goodies, aside from a neat wireless PowerPoint slide controller, but was very happy to leave Fry's with a copy of 'Lost' season 1 (only just started airing in the UK) on DVD. Limited to one purchase per customer, this sold for the ridiculously low price of USD33 - that's less than UKP20!
I love shopping in America!
I spent the rest of the day chilling out with friends in San Diego and tomorrow I head out to Los Angeles, taking the coastal Amtrak train, and arriving in time to register and get a quick look around before the first workshop on Monday. Judging from posts over on Channel 9 people have already started arriving in droves and things are already starting to get busy.
