Oh hell, is this what the world is coming to?

[Onkel Neal]

First, let me set the scene. I began to notice my awesome Dell laptop touchpad was not clicking
and was raised 2mm above the rest of the palm rest. Weird? Is the touchpad faulty? Is it trying to immigrate to Sweden?



A search shows that the problem is the battery beneath it.
Seems high end laptop batteries are prone to swelling... not good.



(Don't say anything about the size of the pictures, it gets better)

Ok, so I order a new battery, and of course the teeny Torx screws, well, my smallest tool is T6 so I need a T5.
I didn't really think anything smaller than a T6 was real, more like a myth, but you live and learn so off I goes to Best Buy.

I enter the Best Buy and to speed up the process of finding their PC tools,
I ask the young fella at the door, "Can you point me to your PC repair and tools section?"

He says, "Sir, we don't stock tools, we are an electronics store."

Me: "Say wha, you don't have tools to work on PCs? Like small Torx and screwdriver kits?"

"No sir, you may want to try Home Depot, we are an electronics store."

Resisting many primal urges including one where I leap upon him and bite him furiously in the
jugular, I croak, "Ok, you sell computers here, still, right? You don't have any computer toolkits?"

"No, you may want to try Radio Shack if they are still in business but we're an electronics store..."

"Gah! I know, you've told me. Look, let's talk to one of the techs here, maybe they can help me."

I'm sure he rolled his eyes at this point and was thinking 'what's the deal with this old dude?
Maybe I can upsell him on a Lil Wayne CD....'

He found a substantially nerdier looking guy hunched over his phone and said, "This customer wants
some tools for his computer, do we have anything?"

The nerdy guy looked up, said, "We may have a kit in the (something) department". We went over and
there on a rack, alone and forlorn, was a cheap tool kit with some screwdriver bits, but it was so crap it
would have looked more in place in the $2 grab bin at a Dollar store. It didn't even list the size of the bits on the box.

I ended up getting a kit from Lowes hardware, it wasn't great but it worked. I tell you, WTH is the world
coming to when a guy cannot go into a computer store and get a basic set of tools to work on his PC?