Ya' Done Broke Down

My computer screen has been inoperative since shortly after we landed here.   I awoke to the first morning in France with an inert screen of darkness.  I could hear the computer humming away beneath it.  “You’ve been a good ole wagon, daddy but ya’ done broke down.”  Fortunately everyone in the family has a computer and most of them are more concerned with their smart phones. 

This morning I have to get go to the place to secure our rental vehicle.  No more bicycles.  We need to cover one-thousand kilometers of driving in the next few days.  And I need to return a book to the bike rental company.  But this is also the first morning since we arrived a few days ago when I might be able to have my computer looked at.  My first morning was a Sunday and any sort of computer store was most assuredly closed. There is a store I’d searched out that day that serves Mac’s here in Avignon so before I do anything else I hike up into the old city and try to find the place. 

I had more time to think about how this was going to be a useless venture than I’d initially considered.  It was a good twenty-five minutes of marching, considering all the time my progression on my little mapping app.  The city was just rising and there was only the occasional person walking in front of me, or cutting across my path.  I came up on what must have been the street and the number of my Mac store set me before a building that was closed.  I asked the red headed, contemporary of a woman, manning the soap shop next door if she knew about a Mac store.  “Ahh, next block.”  And so it was.

I waited in their petite, hip-ette showroom, while an Italian woman engaged with the two French proprietors.  The men seemed to enjoy peppering their speech with Italian and it was all quite jovial until they turned to me.  I noticed a framed photo of a young Steve Jobs there, beside the main counter from the days when he was hirsute.

A big guy with a buzz cut asked and after falteringly trying to explain the problem in French he gave me the clearance to switch to English.  He looked and my computer, noticed a place in the back where some of the case had been chipped away and then communicated as much in French to his partner, another tall, stout guy with short blond hair. “That was there before the problem . . .” I offered. They suggested they’d need a week to do any diagnostics whatsoever and, as long suspected, the entire venture had been useless as I was leaving town today, never to return.  “Pas de problem” I suppose I had held out hope that they might have spotted something obvious.   They didn’t.  I asked what the quickest way was to a cab queue.