Rui CarmoSo, despite today being the worst day in the year according to some people, I would think it was a fairly happy and rewarding one. I solved a couple of fairly critical issues that were floating around since Friday, finally got my copy of Office 2004 Professional (Virtual PC included, of course), got my medicals back (nothing to report, thankfully) and seem to have successfully brought my iMac G5 saga to some sort of closure.
From my standpoint, everybody won out:
- I win because I get my iMac and learn from my mistakes in re-publishing information people toss me without double-checking.
- Apple wins because they showed the commitment (both local and global) to solving my issue and made it plain (at least to me) that there is a lot more about European retailing that people should be aware of. Especially here in Portugal, where there is a lot of static in the channel...
- FNAC wins because they get the sale (and I made it a point to stick to them due to the way their store manager helped solve things).
Judging from the feedback in the few hours that elapsed since that post, however, getting things solved is nowhere near as popular as calling attention to problems, and I have quickly gone from "famous from the wrong reasons" to "infamous".
Traffic to my site tripled today (interestingly enough, to the previous episodes of the iMac saga and later to my HOWTO, which is getting a lot of exposure due to the Mac mini), and in the meantime I got an interesting set of comments and e-mails that range from finding my "sudden turn of opinion" to be "suspicious" to flat out accusing me of "betraying" the Apple community in Portugal and ranking me as a "turncoat".
Some of them had to be fished out of my "Junk" folder.
Which was, to me, an excellent reminder of why I'm not part of the "traditional" Mac community over here (which, oddly enough, still seems to be running OS 9, judging by some of the e-mail headers).
And people still wonder why I changed this site to English a few years back.
So, that's it, then. No more commentary about Apple in Portugal until these people chill out.
I will surely be accused of revisionism as I go back and edit my previous blog posts to point out where I was wrong, but those people will surely gloss over the fact that one of the reasons I use a Wiki is that it leaves an audit trail of every page change - I am fully accountable for all versions of that page, and have nothing to hide.
One has to wonder if there is any benefit in pointing that out to people who clearly have nothing better to do.