Musings & Thoughts for Tuesday, May 11, 2021, or: No Joy on the Wayward Laptop & Other Aggravations

Hi, there, Dear Reader. It is late morning here in New Hometown, Florida on Tuesday, May 11, 2021. Currently, the temperature is 83˚F (28˚C) under sunny skies. With humidity at 75% and the wind blowing from the east-southeast at 3 MPH (4 KM/H), the heat index is 85˚F (29˚C). Today, we can expect partly sunny skies and a high of 94˚F (34˚C). Tonight, the forecast calls for partly cloudy skies and a low of 71˚F (22˚C).

Well, as I suspected, my Lenovo – IdeaPad S340 15″ Touch-Screen Laptop did not arrive last night. And, to be honest, I will be shocked if it arrives any time between noon today and the weekend. Neither of the two shipping services that have provided tracking info – the U.S. Postal Service and UPS – can tell me where my computer is, much less when it will get here.

Best Buy says on its Order Status page that my Lenovo – IdeaPad S340 15″ Touch-Screen Laptop shipped on Monday, May 3 and that the darned thing is “in transit.”  The Postal Service, on the other hand, says that my package has a USPS tracking number but no “scan history.”

For its part, UPS, which is Best Buy’s shipping partner, says this:

Estimated delivery:

Check back tomorrow for an updated delivery date.

If UPS or the Postal Service – I don’t care which one at this point – could at least tell me where my computer is, I probably would calm down a bit and not be worried about the when will it get here? part of the shipment process. Is it really en route or is someone in the logistics chain giving Best Buy false information? I don’t know, Dear Reader. Your guess is as good as mine.

Forgive me if I seem more flustered than a 58-year-old adult male should be. But for me, a $644.99 computer is a major investment. If this were, say, a movie on Blu-ray or a book, I would take this more in stride and just let things play out. But $644.99 is a huge amount of money for me, even taking into account that I will pay my credit card bill in several installments rather than all at once. And the not knowing where that laptop is today – or if it is coming at all – is unnerving.

I should have just ordered the Lenovo – IdeaPad S340 15″ Touch-Screen Laptop from Amazon and used the same MasterCard account to pay for it. I would have paid more, yes, but – except for a brief time when Amazon used Lasership as a shipping partner in Miami and quite a few of my orders went missing because they were misdelivered – I have not had many issues with purchases from there. It so happened that on May 1 Best Buy had the Lenovo – IdeaPad S340 15″ Touch-Screen Laptop at $200 less than its regular price, and because I had not had issues with Best Buy before, I went for that deal instead.

Today is not going to be a productive day for me. I’m too on-edge to think creatively, and obviously I’m not going to do a “Hemingway” and drink booze to settle my nerves so I can work on the screenplay. I’ve never consumed alcohol in order to be creative, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of occasions when I’ve had wine or beer before 6 or 7 PM. I’m not a teetotaler, and I don’t want to be one, but I’m also no fan of getting shitfaced drunk and passing out on the couch or the floor.

I will probably spend the rest of this day reading The Screenwriter’s Bible or one of the many books I own.

I have a ton of books that I can read, including one that is the source of some aggravation at the moment.

I’m currently reading the 2016 reissue of Harold Coyle’s Team Yankee: A Novel of World War III, which I recently bought because my paperback copy – which I bought while I was still in college! – is old and the cover is badly creased and dogeared.

Sounds like fun, right? Well, it would be, except that the hardcover reissue – by Casemate Fiction – has more than of its fair share of issues with typos and poor copy editing.

As I wrote on my Facebook timeline last night:

There’s nothing more annoying than buying a reissue (in hardcover, no less) of a favorite novel (in this case, Harold Coyle’s Team Yankee: A Novel of World War III) and being distracted by careless typos and bad edits that, frankly, weren’t in the battered paperback I bought when I was in college.

Well, there are worse things, like buying a laptop through Best Buy and not knowing where it is because UPS used a subcontractor rather than handling the shipment themselves.

At least I can do manual edits to the book, even though I will hate the end result. Or I can just put the new hardcover in my Billy shelf and read the tattered paperback.

I have already made a handful of manual corrections, but there’s not enough white space or wiggle-room in the text blocks for me to make good and legible corrections with pen or pencil. Sometimes the error is easy to fix, such as a missing comma or letter in a word. Sometimes, though, it is a matter of fixing part of a sentence or crossing out a redundant word or two. (And before you ask, no. Those mistakes are unique to the reissued version. The 1988 paperback edition – the original 1987 hardcover is out of print and hard to find – of the novel does not have them.)

I probably will end up reading another book today. I’m not in the mood to play copy editor!