I was in the Medicine Hat Staples with my grandparents. No salespeople to be seen.

"Time for the Can I Help You Riff," I told Lisa. We slammed the doors of the floor-model printers open and shut. Slam! Slam! Slam!

"Can I help you guys?" said the sales kid when he reached the end of his rapid, nervous beeline.

"Why yes my good man!" Lisa said. "We'll take the Brother HL-2040, please!"

("I thought you didn't LIKE Wayne's World," Lisa said in the checkout line. "I like comedy," I told her.)

When my grandparents bought an iMac DV a few years ago, the sales guy talked them into an extra 128 stick of RAM, which was okay, and a Lexmark inkjet printer, which made my mom's head spin around. They print about two pages every six months, which means that their cartridges always dry out, which means that they have to keep forking out for new cartridges. But my grandparents do what salespeople say because they don't want to disappoint them.

Eventually grandparental tech support became my job, because my head spins around a lot less often.

They decided to get a black-and-white laser printer, I assume because my folks explained that a laser printer's toner ain't gettin' any drier. I know I've mentioned it, as I refuse to buy an inkjet printer myself.

Last week I received an e-mail from Grandma. "We went to Future Shop yesterday but they just moved to a new store and were quite busy so we didn't get much help there." What that means is everyone was very busy and we didn't want to bother anyone so we stood around hopefully for a while and then we went home.

I sighed. "Can you wait two weeks? We can go buy one when we visit." They were very relieved.

While I was there I upgraded their machine to OS X. They've been on OS 9 all this time because we'd managed to get them fairly confident with it. Unfortunately the background printing extension conflicts with something because OS 9 is sad and medieval. Sad and medieval are also good words for lots of things in Medicine Hat, but we'll all be happier when their machine quits throwing the bomb every few months. And, as Lisa pointed out, they're not that well acquainted with how things look in 9 anyway.

I made their Dock huuuuuge. It has six programs installed on it and it fills the whole bottom of the screen. I also installed iChat. "This is the Call Mike For Help button," I said.



Neil Gaiman's blog posted a link to Garfield strips with Garfield's thought balloons taken out. Without them, they become the surreal, pathos-filled story of a broken, lonely man talking to his perfectly ordinary cat, and therefore vastly improved. Click em while they're holy!