Man, when it rains, it pours. When you get in the shit, the shit just falls more on top of you until eventually you find yourself swimming in it. So, I will start today on a positive note instead of going straight to the negative. The positive note is that I did watch at least a tiny fraction of television yesterday, so we can talk about that.

I finished the second season of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder on Netflix, which was somewhat unsatisfying because I felt like we didn’t really solve the Max storyline. I guess that’ll be around for season three, but at least we figured out what happened to Jamie, even if that whole storyline got wrapped up rather unsatisfyingly. I would still watch the third season, though, because Emma Myers is really good, and I did like the audio description. So that was a win. A small victory in my day. It’s possible that I will review it. I don’t know. I really don’t know anything about my life anymore at this point.

I also watched season one, episode 15 of Daemons of the Shadow Realm on Crunchyroll. This episode had audio description by Global 3, like Crunchyroll shows usually do, and just like usual, it’s very well written, but it’s still synthetic. So I stumble into that problem again. This is a weird, really weird series. It’s incredibly hard to describe. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I keep thinking about that in terms of writing a review or trying to recap Daemons of the Shadow Realm, and I just feel like it’s so out of my depth. But it has interesting concepts. Some people have the ability to see these daemons that end up becoming their guardians, and you always seem to have a pair of daemons, not just one. They enter into some kind of contract where they protect you. We’re following one main character and a bunch of supporting characters, but it’s so hard to figure out who all these people are, what they want, what they need, and what their end objective is. I did think it was funny that there are two of them guarding a dog because they entered into a contract to protect a dog. But once again, the audio description was well written, but synthetic.

And that’s basically it. I didn’t have a whole lot of motivation to watch anything else because the second half of my day was consumed, just absolutely, totally, 100% consumed, with nonsense. I left my job a little early to pick up a computer at Best Buy that I had taken in because it had a Trojan, and I wasn’t confident in my abilities to remove it completely on my own. Technically, this is my mom’s computer, but it’s basically there just for surfing the internet anyway. It isn’t even a year old. Its sole purpose in life is to check email, play online AARP games, and watch YouTube videos. That’s it. Somehow, through what I assume was a bad link, it caught a Trojan. So, yep, I paid Geek Squad to fix it. They signed me up for Best Buy Total instead of just paying for the repair, which I was initially fine with because I have some other things that are broken. Maybe I’ll bring those in. Whatever.

The guy who checked me in was one of those “I got you” guys. We’re not really friends, but he acts like we are. “I got you. If you ever run into anything, just toss my name around. I’ve been here 17 years. Everyone knows me.” One of those guys. He also told me the computer basically didn’t have enough space to maintain Windows 11, which made absolutely no sense to me because Windows 11 came installed on the computer and there is virtually nothing else on it. No files. No extra programs. Nothing. Best Buy wiped it, and when I picked it up Tuesday, I specifically asked if it was going to start like it was brand new out of the box. I was told yes. I was also told they had checked everything, and I specifically remember the guy mentioning sound. I didn’t test the sound in the store because I thought I was going to have to go through the entire setup process from square one, and I’d rather do that at home than stand around in the middle of Best Buy.

Except when I got home, it wasn’t starting from square one at all. There was already some kind of profile installed, I no longer needed a passkey to get into it, and it basically opened right up. I tried turning on Narrator. Nothing. I played around with the volume. Nothing. I used Seeing AI, and later I used ChatGPT as tech support. ChatGPT actually isn’t terrible at this because it knows Windows Narrator commands, and I’ve successfully used it to fix things before. The problem this time was that we kept getting halfway toward a possible solution before it realized, “Wait, you’re blind and you can’t hear Narrator, so I can’t safely tell you what you’re clicking on.” And then we’d back out again. Eventually, I gave up and called Best Buy tech support.

This is where shit gets really weird. I got past Best Buy’s AI gatekeeper, which recognized my phone number and knew I had Best Buy Total, and eventually I reached tech support guy number one, who was an asshole. I explained the entire situation. His company had supposedly fixed this computer after a virus, reinstalled everything, and somehow returned it without working sound. I’m blind. I use Narrator. Narrator is an audio accessibility feature. So having no sound is a pretty substantial fucking problem. I told him I’m pretty good with keyboards, though, so if he could give me precise commands and navigate me through the process, I could probably get us there. He admitted he didn’t know anything about Narrator and apparently had never provided tech support to a blind person before. Fine. Everybody has a first time. He said he would look some things up and put me on hold.

First, I had to listen to possibly the worst hold music I have ever heard in my life. I would describe it as experimental classical jazz, some unholy hybrid of all three. It was gross, loud, obnoxious, and I hated every moment of it. Then, after about 20 minutes, even the hold music disappeared and I was sitting in complete silence. My phone still showed that the call was connected, so I kept waiting. Every once in a while I’d say, “I’m here. You there? Anybody?” I did a little rendition of “I’m Still Standing.” Nothing. When I hit 51 minutes, I started thinking, damn, am I actually going to make it to an hour? This is a long-ass time for this dude to be learning Narrator, especially considering he hadn’t checked back on me in roughly 40 minutes. Then I wondered if maybe I wasn’t actually on hold anymore. Maybe he had just muted his microphone and was sitting there listening to me.

So I decided to test that theory. I pretended I was livestreaming. If you know how basic I am when it comes to capturing videos, you would know the idea that I could somehow livestream while simultaneously being on a phone call is insane. But I started talking anyway. “Hey, fam, just sitting here on the phone with Best Buy. We’re at 51 minutes. Let me know down in the comments if you think we’re gonna hit an hour.” And while I was talking: click. He hung up. The dude took the bait. He had apparently been able to hear me, and the second he thought I was publicly livestreaming what was happening, suddenly that call needed to end. Apparently, he was more comfortable leaving a blind, disabled customer sitting there indefinitely than simply coming back and saying, “I’m sorry, I’m out of my depth. You need to take this into a store.” I would have accepted that answer. Instead, he apparently decided to take a little vacation in the middle of my tech support call.

So I called Best Buy again. The second person was perfectly nice, but she was also completely out of her depth. She started giving me tech support instructions that required sight, even though I had already explained that I was blind and needed to use Windows Narrator. She would tell me to do something and I’d say, “Well, yeah, I would, but I can’t see that.” And she’d respond, “Oh.” Eventually, her solution was to arrange a callback from the actual store within two hours. Fine. Great. Have the store that fucked up the computer call me back. I also asked if she could escalate me to a supervisor or manager because I wanted to complain about guy number one. These calls supposedly get recorded for quality assurance, and leaving a disabled customer on hold for almost an hour while apparently listening to him the entire time seems like something quality assurance might want to know about. She couldn’t escalate me, so I called Best Buy a third time and specifically asked for a manager or supervisor because of a poor customer service experience. I got another representative instead, told her what happened, and she supposedly submitted some kind of customer feedback about it.

Meanwhile, with my mom helping me visually inspect what was happening on the computer, I finally confirmed a couple of things. First, when hovering over the speaker control, the computer says there is no audio device installed. This is a computer with built-in speakers that apparently believes it has no audio device. So it certainly seems like Best Buy failed to install the proper audio driver, even though the guy at the store specifically told me they checked the sound. I would love to know how they checked the sound on a computer that says it has no audio device installed. I’m also moderately sure they installed Windows 10 instead of Windows 11. I caught a reference to Windows 10, and I noticed that Copilot wasn’t there. This computer definitely came with Windows 11, and I was specifically told more than once that Windows 11 had been reinstalled. So now I’m wondering if they downgraded the operating system without telling me on top of returning the computer without functioning audio.

And after all of this, Best Buy never called me back within that two-hour callback window. The store eventually closed. No call. The computer is still not fixed. So I don’t really know what else to say except: Fuck Best Buy. What an absolutely hot-garbage experience. Thanks, Best Buy, for returning a computer that was supposedly checked and ready to go without working audio, potentially installing the wrong version of Windows, failing to call me back when promised, and employing a tech support representative who was apparently far more comfortable ignoring a disabled customer indefinitely than admitting he didn’t know how to help him. Anyway, that’s the end of today’s diary. I’m having a great time. An amazing time. Everything is going wonderfully.