I work on a team with some people in Arizona and some in another state. Given the current state of the economy, my company has cut down on travel, which has meant that we don't meet in person as much as we used to. Instead, we've been using these "virtual" conference rooms my company has. Basically, you're in a room with half a table and some HD screens on the other end, and they have the same. I was a little skeptical as to how well this would work, but it's actually not that different that being in the same room, except that you can't share snacks.
I say this only to highlight that I'm not all that smart or nerdy, despite what I might tell you in a few minutes, compared to the type of people that come up with things like that. As I believe I mentioned sometime in the past, I find it fascinating that movies 20-30 years ago all thought the future would be about flying cars and yet still thought we'd be using computers the size of refrigerators. My company has been a big part of the fact that you have computers now that can fit in a purse, so I know firsthand that the people who figure that stuff out are the true smart/nerdy people.
Of course, spaceships and lasers are a lot more interesting (at least visually), so I guess that's why they end up in movies. My son is nearly three and already getting into Star Wars a bit, which I think might make me a bad parent given that one of my co-workers in one of those "virtual" meetings yesterday mentioned that he wasn't allowed to watch Star Wars until he was a teenager. I guess his parents had a point: Luke Skywalker is really whiny sometimes, and I don't want my son acting like that.
Having re-watched these recently, one thing that struck me as funny is that Darth Vader at some point equates the fact that Luke has constructed his own light saber with his skills as a Jedi being really advanced. I thought becoming a Jedi mostly had to do with moving objects around with your mind and swordfighting, but apparently there is a big electrical engineering component. I wonder if all those people in the UK who claimed Jedi as their religion (I'm not kidding - look it up) realize that they have a lot of physics and calculus classes ahead of them.
If I needed to build my own lightsaber, I'm pretty sure I'd find the parts at Fry's Electronics. One of my clearly nerdy hobbies is putting computers together, and if you are into that, Fry's Electronics is both a blessing and a curse. If you're not familiar with Fry's, it's a giant warehouse full of about anything (and I literally mean anything) computer-related, as well as a lot of other electronics and a few random things (I found a bin full of Slap Chops the other day). If you need it, they have it, and it's often on sale. That's the blessing part.
The curse part is that Fry's doesn't make anything simple. Some things you can buy without dealing with a sales associate, but they don't bother putting up big signs above the aisles to tell you where things are, opting instead for little signs at the end of the aisles printed on whatever colored paper they can find lying around. Things like computer memory, however, are sequestered behind giant panes of glass. If you haven't purchased computer memory before, there are a lot of speeds and sizes, so it's possible to stand in front of that wall for hours trying to figure out what you need (which is why they have a cafe nearby, in case you miss a meal in the process).
One you figure out what you need (or give up), you have to ask a sales associate for it, but they don't give it to you directly. They type a bunch of stuff into the computer (your name, address, the name of your third-grade teacher, etc.) and then give you a printout that you take to the checkout area, where someone retrieves your actual item. It's obvious that the sales associates operate on some sort of a commission basis, because they try to get all of your other purchases and anything else they can throw into your cart included on that printout.
I probably shouldn't say "take to the checkout area" so lightly. In order to get there you have to walk through a long maze - a gauntlet of potential impulse purchases. They pack in everything from the usual walls of candy, chips, drinks, toys, and batteries to stuff like disco balls and network interface cards. Once you fight your way through all of that (not recommended with small children), you run into the gatekeeper, if you will, who stands on a little tower and sends you to one of about 50 registers. Just to make sure no one gets away too easily, they have set up one last checkpoint on the way out, where they check the contents of your cart against your receipt and mark it with a highlighter Costco style.
Even then, you are not really done with the Fry's experience. Inevitably, something you purchased won't work (or at least not the way you want it to). I've always found the return experience at Fry's to be a little challenging, but recently I ran across this article from 1997 that confirmed my suspicions. Apparently, at the time Fry's took some heat for having a return policy internally called "Double-H" (hoop and hurdles). While I'm sure they relaxed this a bit after the adverse publicity, I think the principle lives on, since I usually walk away feeling like I've committed some kind of misdemeanor. It's also inevitable that you'll end up returning something at some point; when I brought back my item, they just slapped a discount sticker on it and put it back on the shelf.
I'll be honest, though. I really like Fry's, for the most part, and try to make up excuses to go. A lot of people seem to have a hard time breaking away from an abusive partner, and I guess I'm no different. My latest excuse is that (here comes the nerdy part to which I alluded earlier) I'm turning our old computer into a home media server that I can connect to my cable/TV. It only took a few trips to Fry's to get it up-and-running, but it looks like I have more ahead of me because it freezes up after about 30 seconds, and I've narrowed the cause down to the CPU or dust or the power supply or the video card or a device driver or the hard drive or my Windows installation. A normal person would just buy something like this from HP or Dell, I suppose, but you'll never become a Jedi that way.
[As a sidenote, while we're talking about nerdy things, I've told a few people recently that if you have seen the new Star Trek movie and/or watch Lost, you aren't allowed to call me a nerd for watching Battlestar Galactica unless you are willing to admit that you are a bigger one yourself, given that Battlestar Galactica doesn't involve any aliens, killer clouds of smoke, time travel, or J.J. Abrams.]
