Always Be Guilty

Preamble

Of late, one of our lab PCs has been giving us trouble. It crashes at inappropriate times, e.g. during experiments. The instrument supplier confirmed that the current CPU wasn't up to the job.

As such, I've been emailing the guy in the computer company¹ that assembled it to see the CPU upgrades the motherboard can handle. The guy was very helpful, he gave me the motherboard name and supplied a list of compatible dualcores. I was curious to see if quadcores could be used.² He promptly got back to me with a list of those. 3GHz+ quadcore was too expensive, so I figured that I'd go to my friend, Google,^3,4 to see if a slower quadcore matched/out-matched a faster dualcore. A blog called Coding Horror,⁵ decided it for me. In a nutshell, if the requirements aren't rendering-heavy/parallelizable the change isn't worth it.

I emailed the guy, just a bit more, confirming that I'll be going with dualcore and then that I'll be in touch with the order details. While I was doing up the purchase order,⁶ I checked out a standard on-line computer sales thingy and found it at a much lower price.

Preamble Summary

I was in touch with a guy about buying a CPU upgrade, but found it cheaper somewhere else and the guy is waiting on my purchase.⁷

Coffee's for Closers

So, after much wrestling (figuratively speaking), I decided I wasn't going to order the CPU from the guy, irrespective of the time the guy Guy⁸ spent helping me. This meant I had to e-mail Guy and tell him I won't be buying the part from his company.

I composed a terse email, which I then tried [and failed] to pad out to sound friendly:

Hi Guy,

A colleague found the CPU at a lower price from an alternate vendor and we decided to purchasing it from them.

Sincerest apologies for the inconvenience I have caused you,

I conferred with Damian about it and he said I should come up with something less honest and possibly, well, nicer.

Hi Guy,

Our IT specialist happened to have a spare CPU because of a delivery mix-up, so we will not need the CPU afterall.

Sincerest apologies for the inconvenience I have caused you,

Damian had another gander, and observed it looks like a blatant lie. I agreed and imagined Guy'd see through the thinly veiled rebuff. So I defaulted to the first e-mail. I felt bad to send it to him, but somewhat soothed by "giving it to him straight."

And so I waited with trepidation for Guy's rejoinder:

Hi Martin[,]

That is fine[.]

Thanks for the opportunity[.]

Cheers[,]⁹

Guy

I felt like I had just kicked a puppy. I certainly hoped that there was at least tincture of sarcasm there. If that wasn't the case, the only images that came to mind were of Gil, "Ah jeez, I almost had that one."

I still feel a bit bad about it... so here I am writing it down; the internet is the new confessional!

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¹I'm not tellin' which company it is. Let's just rule out Dell because they were terrible at getting back to us even with preliminary specs (10s of weeks!), let alone a quote. The company we did go with gave us our PC within 5 working days- win!

²I ascribe to the Tim "the Tool Man" Taylor school of hardware.

³A sore hoke on the aul to the prestigeⁱ that many have suffered (Newton/Leibniz, Bell/Reis/Meucci, Rowling/Stouffer/Jacobs, etc.) is the galling discovery that their original idea wasn't.

⁴Everything you need is on the internet. With this in mind, "I always Google before I do my own bit."ⁱⁱ

⁵Earlier today, I read through it to disable the pesky automatic update/restart on XP. This irritant persists on XP if you don't click "restart later" every 10 minutes. Without going into configurations or command prompt it cannot be disabled and if one were silly enough to ignore the pop-up window, it will just go ahead and do restart anyway.

⁶By "I," I mean I assumed a managerial/hands-off position as one of the first year PhD students, Damian, did it.

⁷True, I could have said that in the first place, but seemingly extraneous information helps with decision making.^iii,iv

⁸It seems rather dehumanizing to call him "the guy"; I'll give him a proper name.

⁹Either the lack of punctuation was a subtle snubbing, or he was a bit emotional about the fracas.

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ⁱName that quote.⁴

ⁱⁱComing soon to a vendor of cheesy customer endorsements near you.

ⁱⁱⁱWell, that is what they say.

^ivI just dropped arguably off-topic footnotes/knowledge on you, my readers, because I can. Whatchu gonna a do about it!?^α

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^αIn further unrelated news, Hippo becomes mayor of a village (link).^β

^βIn truth is less unrelated and more allusive.