Customer support

I brought my new Dell home on Thursday and I already found out that there is no support for anything you are likely to do with the computer. What is actually covered I don't know. Perhaps shooting the computer out of a cannon over the Mojave Desert might get the attention of customer support.

I couldn't download Adobe reader or Adobe flash player, no matter how hard I tried. So I went to Firefox and downloaded a bunch of stuff, the names of which I cannot now remember. But I am getting videos now.

Except for the audio part. I checked control panel, and the speakers are installed, so that's not it. Back I went to web support, and I got this little handy-dandy suggestion:

Turn off the computer, unplug everything, and then plug everything in again and restart the computer.

I don't know whether I should do this at midnight while sprinkling salt over my left shoulder and then walk in a circle 7 times. All I know is that I have a backache from crawling around on the floor and a headache from trying to see all the little USB ports. Oh yes, and it didn't work.

I'm getting to the point where I am stopping being defensive about my lack of computer knowledge and starting to wish they did this another way. When I bought a car I did not get several large unwieldy boxes containing the chassis, wheels, tires, clutch, and automatic transmission. It was already assembled, in a place quaintly called a "factory" by persons known as "workers." And though I am ignorant about motor vehicles--all I know about them is that you have to put gas in them to make them run--it hasn't stopped me from driving, using the aforementioned wheels, etc, like a pro.