Year: 2008

I had to stop by Best Buy today to pick up a new WiFi router for our apartment. Normally, stopping by Best Buy is something I tend to avoid at all costs, and I’ll only go in when I know exactly what I need to get, so I can go in, grab it, and get out as quickly as possible. Today, however, I wasn’t quite sure what router to get (or if it would really be worth getting a new one), so I crossed my fingers and hoped I’d find a sales droid who had at least one and a half, if not two whole brain cells to rub together.

I ended up speaking to two — first, a guy in a green shirt, who was apparently the in-store Clearwire representative, but who happened to be free and knew something about WiFi routers. After describing the situation to him and batting things about, he led me back to the correct shelf, and he snagged a blue shirt on the way. I gave the blue shirt the Readers Digest Condensed Cliffs Notes version of the conversation I’d just had, he recommended a Netgear router to me, and — once again, crossing my fingers — I grabbed it and headed off to work.

(Minor aside: the issue in question was that our D-Link WiFi router seemed to have issues with Hermie, our Vista laptop. The D-Link worked fine over the wired connection with both Macs in the apartment, and connected fine via WiFi to my G5 desktop. Hermie consistently works fine with WiFi in public places — during travels, at the local Panera, and at NSCC — but it had serious issues connecting to the D-Link at home. Some days it would only connect after anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes of repeated tries, other days we wouldn’t be able to get it to connect at all. Needless to say, this has been more than a little frustrating.)

After getting home from work, I unpacked the Netgear router, plugged it in, and went through the installation song and dance, using the ‘Installation Wizard’ on the CD from Hermie. Once it said it was up and running, I checked both desktops via the wired connections, and they were fine. Checked the Airport connection on my G5, it was fine. Rebooted Hermie (to cover all my bases), logged in, and started to head to the ‘Network’ icon down in the try to initialize the connection…but wait, what was that? It was already connected! No muss, no fuss, no error messages telling me it couldn’t connect…it was just there, just like magic. Just like it’s supposed to work.

Thinking back on it, I realized that this now makes five times in a row that I’ve had to go into Best Buy for something, and come out with what I needed, and — when I’ve had to deal with any of the staff — actually not been driven to distraction by their idiocy. In this case, I was actually given good information, and they helped me find what I needed.

I must say, while I’m still no fan of the overall Best Buy experience (their stores tend to come across as oppressive to me…too loud, with aisles that are packed too closely together to make the experience pleasant), five consecutive good experiences have to lead me to admit something of a trend. I don’t know if they’re starting to emphasize more or better training that deals in actual knowledge rather than simple salesmanship, but for some time now, the staff has seemed far more competent than I would have expected.

I may not ever get to a point of just stopping by to browse, or remotely look forward to having to dive into Best Buy…but at least at the moment, I don’t feel the need to actively avoid the store or it’s sales droids when I do stop in. And, for Best Buy, that’s saying a lot.