My Saturday had a rather simple plan: Wake up, eat breakfast and hitch a ride back to Martin. An early morning knock on my door asked whether or not I'd like to go to a computer show at the Tennessee Fairgrounds. I, being a guy and a bit of a geek, couldn't resist. So, we headed out.
I'd been to one of these before with a friend of mine from camp, more specifically, the husband of the camp director. Had I not had previous experience, I would have been really disappointed when I got to this "computer show" and realized it was more of a flea market for geeks. So I already had my expectations rather low.
We get there and paid the $6 per person to get in. I read somewhere that there was a package deal going on, where if you came to the fairgrounds for the computer show; you could get a discount on the concurrently running Gun, Knife and Fishing show in the next pavilion. I'm of the general opinion that mixing liberal computer geeks with gun toting conservatives is a bad idea. But, they always seem to happen at the same time.
We made our rounds the show floor, walking past piles of the computer equipment of yesteryear, most dirty and covered in masking tape. Wall after wall was filled with 15" CRT monitors, with obvious defects and color shifts. The only clean, new items on the floor were computer cases painted in psychedelic colors and with LEDs showing through the cutouts in the case. If I were much younger and still had the urge to build my own machine, I might have never left those booths.
One guy in particular was yelling out over the crowd "Everything's from Best Buy! Optical mice seven bucks! DVD-R burners, $25 bucks!" Sure, it was from Best Buy ... as in, the returns department. All of it was open box, and most looked defective. But, with the absence of a bench testing area, there was no way to be sure. If there's a quick way for someone to make a buck, sell bench time to show-goers so they can hassle the guy for a return while still in the building. Of course, most of the booths had nice, big red signs that said "ALL SALES FINAL."
I chuckled a bit as we walked past the adult movie section, saying "Well, they know their clientele." Several other pieces of software were littered across the tables, even a few copies of Windows XP at rather low prices. Of course, these weren't the boxed copies, but the copy you get when you buy a new PC. I have a funny feeling that this it is illegal to resell those, but I digress.
I feel like if I were one of the Digerati, I would have overturned the tables and declared them all heretics for violating the Sacred Geek Code. These purveyors of the processor were nothing more than con artists with a few words of technical jargon littered in their vocabulary to sound more convincing. I felt bad for the poor Gun, Knife and Fishing show folks who had wandered in, and taken for all they were worth. I even heard one guy exclaim "I got a 200 mHz Pentium processor for 20 bucks!" to which I mumbled "my cheap-ass cell phone is faster."
We left there empty handed, all for the better.