This story (part 1, part 2) started to take a slight turn for the better when I got back to my office and called the InCompetenceUSA corporate office (1-800-266-7872). I reached Dottie who logged my complaint about the regional office and assigned a case number. Unfortunately, I would never hear from Dottie, the corporate office, the regional office, or the local Tacoma store before the 6pm Tiger launch time. I tried calling after both my radio shows and received a message that the corporate support was now closed.

Great.

So it was 4:41pm and time to decide to head to a store. My wife thought I should check out the Apple store instead of InCompetentUSA and that made sense, but after all the drama yesterday, I felt I needed to play this out; I needed to see if I would be one of the lucky 24 to snag a copy of Tiger from that store. Maybe it’s the accident scene mentality where you slow down to see if there is any carnage.

Also, I didn’t know with traffic if that would further be putting the squeeze on my meeting with WebTalkRadio. I felt like I was impolitely inconveniencing them as it already is because I was supposed to be there at 5:30pm and I asked on the day of the event to move it ahead for the Tiger launch. Again, they didn’t seem to mind at all.

I climbed into my Saturn Relay with OnStar and made the trek toward InCompetenceUSA for the second time this day. Along the way I had some thoughts and decided to call my Skype voicemail and leave them. A call first at 9:17AM, then later (the 2nd trip) 5:12pm and again right in front of the store at 5:37pm where I took the picture shown below.

I wasn’t the only nerd loitering around the Mac section of the store. An older guy who seemed pretty experienced was telling me about the different books that could be purchased. That reminded me of Nancy’s earlier statement about how they couldn’t even show us the box until 6pm. Please. When they would roll out a shopping cart twenty minutes later, the mystical box was nothing special to look at.

One of the funny things I found about the situation was how people would come up and ask about Tiger and the sales rep kept looking at the clock as if even being one second early would bring down the wrath of Steve Jobs. It’s absurd even thinking that you could buy entire books with screenshots of the guts of Tiger and step-by-step how to do things in Tiger, but they couldn’t display the box or even turn on the system running Tiger until the clock struck 6pm?

A musician was there, he totally dug Apple. All in all, there were about 15 of us waiting. There would be no problem on getting a copy. I didn’t tell them my name or anything. Nobody asked.

I did ask the rep to confirm the number of copies: “So I heard you have like 24 copies, huh?”
“Is that what they told you? No, you should be fine. We’ve got 90.”
90 copies! Not 24 copies as the sales manager had told me on Thursday and Nancy the clerk had confirmed when the store first opened. Nearly four times the copies they told me they had.

I was starting to get Mac fever talking with the other Macheads in attendence. 14 minutes, 12 minutes … 7 minutes. A couple of guys told me the shocker with about three minutes to go.

“Hey, did you know Tiger only comes in DVD format?”
My heart froze. Only DVD format? What? I have an eMac that doesn’t have a DVD drive. So I was going to be able to get Tiger but have no way to install it. Oh, man, say it isn’t so.

I verified with the clerk that the information was correct: “Is this only in DVD format?”
“Yes.”
“What about if you have an eMac? Can you just use a Firewire or USB DVD drive?”
“If it’s bootable, yes.”

Why did I get a sinking feeling that my weekend was going to be spent trying to run down an external Firewire DVD drive that was bootable so that I could install Tiger?

Somebody cried out that it was 6pm and where was Tiger? The clerk looked at his watch and seemed to agree finally that the magic hour had come. He went into the back and unceremoniously wheeled out a cart full of Tiger boxes.

The Box That Couldn’t Be Seen was essentially the same black box with blue-gray X features on their website the past couple days and a small white Apple logo. Talk about major anti-climax.

So InCompetenceUSA may never have called me back in time for the launch, but they successfully delivered the product on time and I was able to purchase a copy. That’s not too incompetent, I guess. The customer no service stuff explained mostly in part 1 and 2 sucks, but I received what I was hoping for: Tiger. Even though I can’t install it yet on my system, but at least I have The Box.

Tomorrow I’m going to begin the search for an external DVD firewire drive that is bootable as the clerk told me. I’m not very Mac experienced so if any Mac veterans managed to get this far, perhaps they can point me in the right direction? I think I’ll be hitting the Apple store at the mall later today.

I will continue this discussion at my Mac Blog, so if you want to know all about what I actually find inside The Box, then please head on over there and subscribe to the RSS. Warning: the design used there sucks in IE. Looks great in Safari though. I’ll post pictures of me with The Box too.

Oh, and one last thing, my webmaster friend FranciscoIV is pointed out that TigerDirect is suing Apple over the use of the word Tiger. We talked about this on Webtalk Radio a bit yesterday.

Hey, this story had a happy ending … if I were to write Part 4 and stay with the Trekish motiff, it would be: The Voyage Home (the one where they go back in time and get humpback whales). My voyage home isn’t quite complete though because I have one more journey: finding/buying the external DVD drive with firewire that’s bootable in Mac.

I do wonder if I’ll ever hear from anybody at CompUSA. I’ll write about how that turns out if/when I do. For those who came along for all three parts of this story, thank you for reading. For those that I burned out on this long, winding tale, ok, I’ll get back to the regular stuff now.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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