Shattered Faith

My itinerary options opened up for my R&R in March. They offered me two flights. The first one is basically the same one I took in November. Dubai straight to Washington/Dulles, then to Allentown. I arrive around 10 AM (or 10:30, can’t remember) for $1,167. The second option was from Dubai (leaving two hours later) to Frankfurt, then to Philadelphia. I arrive at 8 something at night (an hour away from Allentown mind you) and it cost $1,996. Hmmmmmm. Yeah, it was a tough decision. After much deliberation I opted for the former. I went onto United’s website and paid $298 to upgrade the seats since I was rather uncomfortable last time. Being tall can really suck. My knees were pressed against the food tray in front of me the entire flight, and that’s with the person keeping their seat in the upright position. If they put that bitch down.. God help me. The upgrade puts you in Economy plus which nets you 5 extra inches of leg room. I looked at a seating chart and saw for both flights they had aisle seats in the very first row available. I’m assuming these are those seats where there is nothing but the wall in front of you, giving me the option to stretch out or cross my legs. I’m hoping. So those were the ones I picked. Worth the $300 for such long flights I feel. Maybe this time I’ll get served dinner first too so they won’t run out of the god damn chicken by the time they get to me.

I’ve also decided to go ahead and splurge on a new laptop. I didn’t really want to get a new one, but the current one decided that whenever I try to run more than one program at once it tells me No. Awesome. Fuck multi-tasking anyway. So I went completely over the top as usual and configured a Dell XPS m1330 (the 13.3″) that came out to almost $2900. The thing was pretty beastly for such a little package, but so was the price. I googled Dell Coupons and stumbled across one that said 25% off any xps m1330 order over $1700. Bitchin! So it brought it down to just under $2200. Still expensive, but that’s quite the discount. I go ahead and order it and not 3 days later I get an email from Dell offering for me to be an early adopter of the NEW Dell studio XPS 13. Leather accents, piano black (finger print magnet I’m sure). Everything about it (except less ram) was better, and after I configured it for shits and giggles it came out to $1619. What. The. Fuck. What abysmal timing. By then I still had a few days until the original order’s ship date so I figured I’ll take a risk. I went and ordered the new studio XPS and sent them an email asking them to cancel the original order. Their website says they respond to all emails within 24 hour or less – which is bullshit because it took them three god damn days. Finally on the day of the supposed shipping I got an email saying they cancelled my original order. It worked out but I was worried for a minute. If they didn’t cancel it I would have ended up with two laptops, and their restocking fee can be up to 15% if the item doesn’t have any faults. That would have sucked a bit.