An exercise in patience

I certainly hope the old adage is true; using the birthday money I received, I decided to treat myself to a shiny new DS Lite along with New Super Mario Brothers. Tax free weekend in Taxachusetts saved me a few bucks. Hooray for me! Or so I thought.

After charging new shiny white in my life, I popped in NSMB and was absorbed for roughly thirty minutes. My revelry was interrupted when the sound suddenly spiked to its loudest setting. I hadn’t touched the volume slider; my fingers were nowhere near it. Hmm.. perhaps I bumped it without realizing it. Nope; it was right where I set it. OK, let’s just crank it down. It’s no use Captain! The volume slider, she willna work anymore.

Yep, with all the news about cracking hinges and dead pixels, I was not expected for a defect like this. So, I trucked back to Best Buy to exchange it the next Saturday; damn… they were not in stock at the moment. They told me to come back Tuesday because they were getting forty units in. Lies… I showed up after work, and they still had none in stock with no estimate of when they would be in stock. However, the Brockton store has them in stock.

Double damn; Brockton is twenty minutes away and not exactly a town known for its congeniality. But I need my Mario fix! So, I trucked my ass down to Brockton and scored a replacement. Got it home, and charged it up. Can you guess what happened when I fired up Mario? Go on… I’ll give you a few seconds on the clock.

If you said “Dead Pixel”, you are correct! Yes, a nice fat dead pixel staring at and mocking me. Guess I’ll be heading to a third Best Buy, the one relatively near my job (read as another twenty minute drive) during lunch and hope to finally score a working unit. Anyone want to lay odds that the next unit I get will crack its hinge?