Disney Travelogue, Part One

We set out last week, bright and early, and got to the airport with plenty of time to spare. Yaaay, us! And then we were promptly fogged in. For HOURS. Thank goodness for Webkinz and Leapster.

Even so, it wasn't long before Bella was losing patience, and crying, "Can we just go to Disney World already? THAT'S WHY WE'RE HERE." Our original flight was delayed, delayed, delayed again, and finally canceled. If you want to witness a really sad scene, hang around the airport terminal when they announce the cancellation of the day's only flight to Orlando, and then watch two dozen Disney-bound children burst into simultaneous tears. Eventually Alex got us another flight that, unfortunately, went through Atlanta instead of directly to Orlando. Bella was really excited about flying, and thoroughly loved it. I was apprehensive at first, mostly due to the good-sized crop of trepidatious (the correct word is "trepid," just in case you're relying on me for vocabulary enrichment, but it's not nearly as satisfying as "trepidatious"), sobbing children all around us. I thought their anxiety would be contagious, but I needn't have worried. It wasn't long before she was an old hand at flying, and was ordering snacks and beverages like she'd been doing it her whole life.

And yes, those are MY iPod earbuds, and yes, they fit my five-year-old daughter. If you are similarly afflicted with teeny-tiny ears, and standard iPod earbuds are a problem for you like they are for me (and my kid), then I highly recommend this model, that my mom found. They're made by Sony.

So it was that we arrived in Orlando not around noon, as intended, but something close to eight hours later, and dog-tired. We took Disney's Magic Express (definition: comfy bus with a perfectly-timed Disney infomercial playing on GPS-driven television sets) from the airport to our hotel, leaving our checked bags behind for Disney to pick up and deliver to our suite. In hindsight, if we'd picked up our own bags, we would have been able to go to sleep in our own pajamas that night, but we weren't exactly thinking straight.

No matter what time you arrive, Disney's Grand Floridian Resort and Spa is one heck of an impressive place. Bella and I were both well-entertained by the ginormous Christmas tree and life-size gingerbread house (yes, made of real gingerbread) for the duration of the checking-in process. Alex's mom had secured us some first-class lodgings, and we were verrrrry grateful.

In that backpack is her Webkinz pink pony, "Alice." She wore it ALL DAY LONG, never once taking it off.

Once the concierge had us finally settled into our rooms, albeit without luggage at that point, we ordered room service and went to bed, which caused our luggage to be delivered at last. No, I can't prove causation, but that's how it played out.

The next morning, we were off to the Magic Kingdom, where we had reservations in Cinderella Castle for breakfast at Cinderella's Royal Table. I cannot possibly overstate the anticipation for this event in one five-year-old girl. Having said breakfast reservations gets you into the park shortly before it opens, along with the opportunity for pictures like this (click it, please--it's so pretty!):

But be aware that while you're taking that picture, you're just about to miss THIS one:

And you really want to document that first glimpse of CINDERELLA'S ACTUAL CASTLE in person...which will be followed shortly by a near-meltdown due to overwhelming emotions. I believe the sentiment expressed at this point was, "THIS IS JUST BLOWING MY MIND!"

Click through to see the note on this photo, and how we very nearly lost Bella to Disney Princess Delirium. More to come.

Dell Tech Geeks Bring The Funny--And The Help

Great jumpin' cats, this Dell thing is taking on a highly entertaining life of its own. If you don't know what I'm talking about, start with my previous post. Read the comments, then follow the magic of the intarweb over to Notes From The Trenches and read Chris' post, "Where Is My Larry?" Do NOT skip the comments, because there are bloggers and tech guys making Veggie-Tales jokes. Chris may not have Larry, but hey, she's got Rick, and he's got attitude. (He's the guy in this video second from left in the back--we speculate that he's the only one of the group wearing a jacket because he got something on his shirt right before the filming. We mostly speculate this because if Alex or I had to be in a video for a corporate vlog, we could almost guarantee you that that would be the day we'd drop a chili-dog down our front.) I predict a happy ending.

To paraphrase an old, seriously annoying ad campaign, Dell: "Dude--Everyone's Watching Dell." Don't make a liar out of me, Rick. Right now, women of the blogosphere are positively buzzing about "the power of the internet." Justify my love, guys (and Margaret). When you have the all-powerful Mir asking, "What have we learned?" and promising "...we'll take a look," you can't drop the ball.

On that, I'm out. Alex and I, thanks to a hugely generous gift from my faboo mom-in-law (you wish your mother-in-law was this great, but mine is the best), are celebrating his birthday all weekend in high style, with fine dining and cushy accomadations. You realize, of course, that this means I'm leaving. My. House. The homefront and horses are well-covered, Bella is thrilled about spending time with grandmommy/aunt/uncle/cousin, the dogs are parceled out among friends and family, Jack The Cat is in charge, and I'm moderately sedated. So hopefully, we'll be living it up this weekend, and Alex will have a happy birthday (it's a Big One), and I won't spend any part of our time away crouched in a corner, rocking back and forth and muttering to myself. I do believe I AM beginning to feel the beneficial effects of the Wellbutrin, so the way I figure it, this little retreat will either snap me right out of my funk, or kill me outright. Either way, the waiting is over. Oh, and we're only going, like, 20 miles from home, and that helps.

And I'm taking my new laptop with me. Thanks to consarned Matthew Baldwin, there will probably be a fierce marital Peggle duel waged all weekend long.

Hello, Dell? I'm Staying. Thank Larry.

And give him a raise. I'm not kidding. DO IT, or else I'll...I dunno, type something. You may recall my grousing a little while back, here and here, about our recurring problems with the power source in our Dell Inspiron laptop, and our huge frustration with Dell's tech support/customer service. Our computer had been sent back several times, the problem was never fixed, and we kept buying new power cords (from Dell) and trying to use the computer while holding the cord in place with one hand. I might have publicly stated that "Dell is full of crap" at least once. It could have been worse.

Blogosphere, I present to you a happily resolved customer service issue:

On the left, Old And Busted. On the right, New Hotness (MIB reference-nod to TSM). Let me 'splain, as best I can, how this miracle of corporate responsiveness came about. You may already know what's coming, but I had no idea, so for the other three people out there who might be likewise in the dark, this is for you.

Within hours of my first post mentioning a problem with our laptop, I received an email bearing the subject line, "Problems with your Dell computer." It was short and sweet, and seemed too good to be true:

Belinda

I am a customer advocate at Dell headquarters in Texas. I read your Blogspot post about having to send your Dell computer back to the repair depot a second time. I wanted to get with you to make sure we get things taken care of. If you can send me the service tag for the computer or a reference number for one of the services and I can pull up all the notes and see what options I have available. If you have any questions for me I will be more than happy to answer them.

I look forward to hearing back from you,

Larry
Dell Customer Advocate

OK, stop right here, before I admit that I thought this was probably bogus, because you're all smarter and more internet-savvy than me, and would not suspect that Larry was actually a Nigerian scam artist who was going to somehow empty my bank accounts and ruin my credit-rating by getting hold of my Dell service tag number. Shut up. And yes, one of two very simple things would have settled the question immediately: A Google search (DUH) or checking my own site's traffic report. What I actually did was to kind of blow Larry off, and ask around. No one I spoke to had heard of anything like this, though most people said it "seemed harmless."

So a few days later, when I griped online again, in a bare mention tacked onto the end of this post, I immediately got another very polite email from Larry, again offering to help. This time, I thought (because I am clever like that) I'd just find out if Larry was for real, and asked for a phone number and extension at Dell...to which he responded by offering to call ME. To which I responded by saying to myself, "AHA! He won't get me that easily! I didn't just fall off the turnip truck, Larry!" I wrote back pretty much implying that I was onto him, and no way was I giving out any information without knowing who I was dealing with. BOY, did I tell him. Ahem.

And as it turns out, I was still ON the turnip truck, because Larry very politely answered that my position was perfectly understandable, and provided the main customer service number at Dell, along with his direct extension. By this time, it had occurred to me to Google the phrase "Dell customer advocate," which I should have done in the first place. If I had, I'd have found numerous articles about this program, and this one in particular, from Dell's own blog, that addressed the very issue I'd had with "stranger danger" apprehension about being approached out of the blue by someone offering to solve a problem. Because honestly, how often does THAT happen? Also at that link, you get to see (and hear) our hero, Larry, in the flesh (and voice) on a video clip! Go, Larry! He's the quiet one of the bunch, but he gets the first and last word in that clip.

So once all THAT was out of the way, Larry got right down to solving our problem. And we were positively bowled over with the speed and efficiency and fairness of his work. When one thing wasn't available, he'd upgrade to the next better thing (I know you love that technical lingo), until finally, because of the uniqueness of our problem and some particulars of our repair history with Dell (seriously, our laptop was whacked), we wound up with a new replacement computer, upgraded from the model we'd had before, because that model wasn't available at the time, and Larry didn't want to make us wait. I'm here to tell you, we had Larry earning his paycheck in dealing with us, because we seemed to have one issue after another, and while he had us our new computer inside of a week, we weren't able to send our old one back to Dell for more than twice that long. (We had to figure out how to transfer our many programs and files from one unit to the other, which was complicated by the fact that the old was unit running Windows XP and the newer one came with Vista. Hint--it involves ordering a special magic cord. For real.)

So now, we are humming right along in computerland, and as you can see from the picture above, we got everything transferred over to the new 'puter, right down to my Huey Freeman wallpaper. Larry even made sure that I got the same faux burled cherrywood cover on the new 'puter that I had on the old one. Between the upgrade and the not having to type with one hand while holding a power cord in the other any more, this new laptop is like a bionic version of the previous one. THANK YOU, LARRY.

As for Windoze Vista: Not a fan. It has a lot of new bells and whistles, true, but anything I needed? No way. Plus, a lot of the new features--heck, most of them--actually clutter up my internet/computing experience and get in the way. It doesn't seem to want to play nice with Mozilla Firefox right out of the gate, but having been told firmly by Alex that this is the way things are going to be, browser-wise, seems to have settled down on that count. And it only took me ONE session of using Vista's "new and improved" Internet Explorer to know beyond a doubt that I LOVE FIREFOX. Never leave me, Firefox.

That Mac commercial, where the PC has the Secret-Service looking guy interrupting him every 5 seconds asking him if he really wants to do what he's trying to do? Totally not an exaggeration. Constant pop-up windows are everywhere, and you have to spend a lot of time turning things off. Software designers and computer manufacturers would make everything easier on us if they'd just send us the units stripped down to the bare basics, along with optional programs on disks, so that we could install only what we WANT, rather than going through the headache of having to figure out how to uninstall what we DON'T want.

Consider this a Love Thursday post. We love Larry. All right, it's not your typical LT fare, but seriously, he brought some happiness and relief into our lives during a very frustrating time.

And that's not for nothing.

UPDATED to add--A response by Lionel Menchaca, Digital Media Manager for Direct2Dell. In part, he writes, to those of you who've expressed your own Dell-related woes:

"I encourage you or anyone else that needs help with their Dell hardware to go here:

http://direct2dell.com/contactus.aspx

My personal e-mail is at the bottom of this page, and the Customer Advocate team email is listed as well (fourth bullet point from the top list)."

Hit it.