Monday 6 October 2008, 12:00 AM
The quest for a Mexican netbook
I feel bereft, without a netbook to be called my own, and spending the next month travelling around all of Mexico. My last Acer Aspire One broke while I hamfistedly tried to upgrade its RAM, so I am forced to write longhand using a pen in a book with old school hand writing, and then to transcribe these scribbles via the medium of the internet. The shame, the shame.
Yesterday, I thought my luck was in. I had found Office Depot, PC World Wannabe. But my slippery and incoherent grasp of spanish has really driven home the issues of communication. Armed with just a few words, web site navigation and structure becomes excruciatingly important. The "our shops" section of the Office Depot web site lists all their shops. But I´m not sure exactly how. And the addresses seem to be different to the maps. And Google Maps doesn´t recognise the postcodes...
With a couple of what I thought to be addresses tucked safely in my (paper) notebook, I set out with a friend to a location in the southern suburbs of Mexico City, near Xola. But the shop wasn´t, it was a secondary school. Undeterred, we set out to find the next store, on the longest street in Mexico, armed this time with a dyslexically written down number. Four miles, an electrical storm, a roundabout ride in a green and white VW beetle taxi later, we arrived at the store. Only to be told that they didn´t have any Acer Aspire Ones in stock, and they wouldn´t have any until next week.
Next stop, Guadalajara, and I will endeavour to phone them up before arriving and check if they´re in stock. Well, at least I managed to buy some socks...
Comments on this post
Sounds like you are in for a bit of an adventure with this one!
Maybe you'll come across some uniquly mexican software that we don't see here at home.
Hi Roger, alas no, everything seems to run on Windows, though I have spotted a few instances of Firefox in the more savvy internet cafes.
