MacCrete

I ring MacCrete's Iro from Mires, she says "Come now, you can be here by 10.30"

They can't mend it because the unit is moulded together in one piece; she tries to borrow one, sends technician Stavros round to fetch it, but the owner's iBook dies without its transformer. So she stretches her comfort-zone of contacts and finds another, sends Stavros off again ... this time it works, which shows that there's nothing wrong with Jenny herself and means I can at least charge up the battery ...

They have no stock themselves, there are plenty of Mac users on Crete, but they all know what they need and order it in good time ... They have a G4 PowerBook sitting there, they're setting it up before delivering it to the medical faculty of the University of Crete, it's perhaps the 7th or 8th to be delivered on the island; it's fun to play with it, but I'm very relieved to recognise that the experience leaves me with no feeling of wanting one myself, as the inspiring but seductive advertising had...

Iro rings her head office in Athens, it takes eight hours to get an answer as to whether or not they have a transformer cable in stock; she understands as well as me that, in principle, it should just be a question of a few seconds to look it up in a database of stock held ... The answer then is that they don't have it, which means getting it from Rainbow, Apple's agents for Greece, which can take weeks and would anyway cost 1200:- SKr / 120 USD.

She says her company doesn't want any money for her time nor for sending Stavros all over town twice ...