The P.C. World adventure

I promised to tell you the P.C. World story so here it is. Take note: DO NOT SHOP AT P.C. WORLD

So my mum and dad arrive back from their holiday last Saturday. They took their digital camera with them and have quite a few phots to show us. They have upgraded their camera's memory since they bought it quite a few years ago so the camera's capacity far outways its ability to rapidly copy the photos to a p.c.
Yes, I am of course speaking of the dreaded serial connection. Hardly heard of in these glorious days of USB but back when aye wer a lad serial was as good as it got. Now don't get me wrong, my mum and dad's digital camera is really good. I've borrowed it loads and when you look at the pictures on my website you are mostly looking at photos I have taken using their camera. The only problem is that their holiday photos took nearly an hour to copy to their p.c.
I wasn't having that. I didn't spend three years at The Spooniversity of Bradford so that I could wait an hour for photos to copy from camera to p.c.
My initial though was that there would be a new cable available for the camera that connected via USB but when I looked at the box for the camera there was a handy little diagram showing all the different ways you could connect your camera to your p.c. and one of those ways was using a card reader.
For anyone who doesn't know, digital camera's have little memory cards in them that your photos are stored on. These cards are removable and I had just found out that there was a card reader that would basically convert the memory card into a USB drive. Cool.
SO, my first stop was ebay. There were some available for a fiver but unfortunately it turned out that I couldn't get one by the end of the day so I started ringing round local shops. None of them could deliver so I turned my attention to P.C. World.
Ever since I was at school I have hated P.C. World. Back then it was because they charged far too much for everything they sold and because whenever we took a visit to P.C. World we were able to confuse the staff by asking them technical questions.
I was willing to forget this and give P.C. World a chance so I hopped onto their website to see what they had. I immediately found a card reader that was pretty much exactly what I was looking for. It cost £10 but I was happy to pay the extra £5 to get it sorted on the day. I ring the P.C. World (premium rate) hotline to make sure they have them in stock and I am reliably informed that indeed they do.
I headed over to P.C. World and asked where I could find the card readers. I was pointed to the camera section at the back of the store and I headed over there. Things started to go wrong immediately. There was no one at the counter and despite the fact that I clearly wanted serving and despite the fact that I could clearly see several members of staff stood around chatting, no one came to serve me. I was rescued several minutes later by a manager who noticed me and immediately had a go at the chatting idiots.
One of them came over, I explained what I wanted and that I knew they had them in stock and could he please get me one. He had a quick look on the shelf and told me they didn't have any.
I explained to him that I knew they had some. I had rung ahead and checked and please could he look elsewhere for them. At this point he said that yeah he supposed he could look in the back for them. Lazy muppet.
He came back about 5 minutes later and had clearly just been for a cig.
I left the store and immediately rang the hotline (premium rate) again. The assured me that the store I was stood outside had exactly 5 of the product I desired in stock. I took the girl's name and went straight to customer services and explained the situation to them.
They insisted that they have never had any card readers priced at £10 and the one I had seen was obviously an Internet offer. I asked him why I had been told that they had them in stock and I was told that the hotline system is not live. IF this is true then please explain to me what the point of it is?
Anyway, I asked him to humour me and look on HIS computer system to see if they had any in stock. He did his search and low and behold up come a list of card readers priced £10.
After a quick apology it appeared that none were in stock and all he could find out back was on for £15. I left empty handed.

To cut a long story short, I found a card reader in a local computer shop which was priced £15 and after a small problem getting it to work I finally installed the reader into my mum and dad's p.c.

The moral of the (very long winded) story is that P.C. World are a huge corporation who do not care about your business. They will give you terrible service and lie to you if they think it will be less effort than helping you.

//rant over.