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Technological Impropriety

We must be in a downturn. Tech support is even harder to find nowadays.

I'm still trying to get my SoundBlaster's EAX drivers installed. The drivers are inexplicably not on the CD or on the website. The mountain of tech tips and FAQs ("How can SoundBlaster's technology enhance my gaming experience?") didn't help so much either. So I finally broke down and tried contacting Creative's tech support.

Do they make this difficult? Boy howdy. There's no email address. There's not even a web form to fill out. No, you have to create a user account with them and file a service ticket. (The user account is one of those amusing forms where, if you make a mistake, the form spits back at you with all the "Send me promotional material!" checkboxes re-checked. They almost got me with that one, but fortunately I made a *2nd* error, and caught it just in time.

I don't hold out much hope that these bozos will be helpful. I can't find my receipt (will I never learn?), so returning the card is not an option. But at the very least, I'll have the satisfaction of tearing the card from the slot and snapping it in half. "Let this be a warning... to all of you," I'll say, shaking my finger at the chassis.

Anyway, I managed to catch the SJ Rep's "Ctrl-Alt-Delete" with Shauna on Friday night. It's a spoof on the dot-com boom, with a surprisingly upbeat ending. It was... OK. Not "In the Bog of Cats", but not bad. The couple sitting in front of us brought their seven-year-old daughter, for what I think was her birthday. A bit of an odd choice, but if they feel their daughter is ready to see a beefy man pull a sock from his leopard-print speedo underwear, who am I to criticize?

By accident, we found the bar where the actors usually come to hang out after the show. Good stuff to know, since I have two more shows this season. I probably shouldn't have bought the whole package, but I was living in different times back then. "Hey hon, guess what? I got us almost the full season of tickets to the SJ Rep!" Who knew all those Good Boyfriend Points would go to waste?

Posted by Evan Goer on Nov. 11, 2001 at 2:55 PM