Guanxi Repellent

It’s good to be back in one’s own kitchen.  I had the temptation yesterday to go get more fast food, a burrito perhaps, from our local place perhaps, and bring it home.  But I haven’t eaten in my own kitchen in weeks.  I haven’t cooked my own meal in all this time.  So I skipped the burrito joint and headed for the super market.  

And it isn’t so much that the food you cook is better, often it is and sometimes it isn’t, but somehow we know how much to eat when we’re at home.  We’ve got reasonably healthy snacks laid out for consumption, healthy fruit drinks for breakfast that fill you up but don’t weigh you down, vitamins, and salads and if there’s too much to eat, it’s fodder for tomorrow’s lunch.  I really labored to eat healthily in Shanghai, always finishing dishes there was no need to do in.

I shuffled off for a third attempt today to get my computer fixed since the screen went dead two weeks back.  The gent down in Shanghai at the Mac Store had done me a great service by simply hooking up the existing computer to a separate screen.  Ta-da.  As suspected, the computer’s fine.  I just needed a new screen.  He’d quoted me about 4000 RMB to install a new one, which is just about as much as a new computer.  However a new screen to connect with a cable would be peanuts. 

I held out faith in my local store.  They’d restored this computer for me once in the past.  They were not the haughty buzz cut boys of the Mac store in Avignon, nor the hidebound proceduralists of the Mac Store in Shanghai, this was an entrepreneurial shop, ready to roll up their sleeves and solve problems.  This is China, where everything is made any way, the best place therefore to get something fixed.

The first girl I spoke with said, quickly and flatly there was nothing they could do.  I pressed.  “How do you know?  You haven’t even tried any diagnostics yet?”  Where’s that guy I dealt with last time.  The guy that liked a challenge.  Her colleague confirmed that they didn’t touch any problems that involved hardware.  “So, don’t you have some third party companies that do?  You must get people in here all the time with hardware issues.”  They gave me banal, general neighborhoods to go look in, nothing of substance.  No.  They didn’t know where I could buy a new, generic display, either.  How un-Chinese, I thought.  Someone else in the ecosystem could be benefiting from your hand off just now.  The boss must have sprayed them with guanxi repellent.

Later, fishing the remains from my flooded basement I realized that I actually still had a separate display.  I could not find the special Mac AVI adapter.  But I photographed the male chord so I could scoop one up tonight, when I head to San Li Tun to meet friends for dinner.  Rough, certainly, dangerous to rely on for sure, but I’m gonna get this lap top working again.  I’ve seen it done before.