The Better Business Bureau Doesn't Know Everything

I picked up my laptop today from the "repair shop" I found on Yelp, although it's not repaired at all. It had been there since the Monday after Thanksgiving with no sign of good news on its progress.

I took it to the genius bar at the Apple store first, but they don't offer repair help with machines more than five years old. This laptop is six years old. They referred me to a reputable place that also told me they couldn't help me, so I tried to find my own "reputable" place with a cross reference between Yelp reviews and The Better Business Bureau.

When I dropped off my laptop, the business wasn't what I expected, but I didn't want to be judgmental. I'd been talking/emailing with the proprietor, a man, but a woman answered the door wearing a poncho and a French beret while smoking a joint. The smell of sweet ganja slapped me in the face as I pushed through the fog of second-hand smoke into a cramped living room with blankets draped on old dolls and stacks of things. The woman called upstairs to the repairman and then went back to sit in her corner, where she'd been rocking a baby carriage. At first my heart sank for that poor baby, until I realized it was a little French bulldog wrapped in blankets poking his head out from the stroller, not an actual infant.

My contact came down the stairs as my contact high was settling in, followed by a gray cat who was completely shaved except for tufts around his head and at each paw, making him look like a small person dressed for the musical "Cats" instead of an actual cat. We briefly discussed my laptop's wifi card troubles before being interrupted by the stoned roommate with a thick Boston Southie accent who wanted to discuss how her dog kept running away.

"Oh no! How does he get out?" Ok, I'll be polite.

"He does it when we go out to pee, he's so stupid. Why would he run away from his home?"

"Well, what kind of leash do you use? Maybe he needs a harness instead of a collar," I offered.

"We don't use a leash, he just listens to me."

Well, clearly he doesn't listen to you. Then she described an incident with a homeless man who found the dog and pushed him around in a stroller for a day and walked him through the McDonald's drive-thru, buying him a hamburger like they were on a date, and ever since then, the dog loves baby strollers. The stroller used to belong to the cat that looked like a human dressed as a cat.

"Ah well, I'll probably have to give him away once I start my business," she mused, and began to describe a barter-for-medical-services community center she'd like to open. Personally, I wouldn't go there to get a band-aid or even to use the phone if I had a car accident and a victim was beheaded right outside the door, but good for her and her spirit of entrepreneurship and giving. She tried to give me a pink iron-on elephant as I was leaving, letting me know that I could iron it on to my underpants if I didn't want anybody to see it.

"I don't own an iron," was the excuse I used for not taking one. I didn't want to discriminate against someone who could potentially be a civil rights activist for the right-to-weed movement that is sweeping our nation. This must be what life is like in Colorado now, right?

I trusted Yelp and the BBB, so I still had high hopes for the laptop repair, but after reading Yoko Ono's full-page ad in the weekend edition of the NY Times yesterday, I was slapped back into reality and remembered you can't trust anything important around women in French berets, so I picked up the laptop today.