I Couldn't Get No Satisfaction At Best Buy, Or: A Bundle Of Confusion, Part 1

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​I COULDN'T GET NO SATISFACTION AT BEST BUY, OR: A BUNDLE OF CONFUSION, PART 1

      Our 9-year old desktop worked perfectly fine. But Microsoft, that nebulous collective entity that controls some esoteric but essential function deep within the innards of our computer, began posting on our screen ill-boding messages warning us that our Windows 8.1 version software was, in their techno-opinion, dreadfully passé,  and if we knew what was good for us we'd get ourselves an upgrade to Windows 11, tout de suite. 
​      And so it was that that my mate Tom and I found ourselves in the unenviable situation of needing to buy a new computer.  Which left us in the even more unenviable situation of needing to make a trip to Best Buy. 

       "Do you think we should have Tommy or Randy to come with us?" asked Tom, referring to our son and nephew, both computer engineers, here helping me ice cupcakes.            

​         "Nah," said I. "We can surely figure out how to buy a new computer."
​          I'd live to rue those words.
          We arrived at Best Buy​ then proceeded to the computer area where we alternately hung around and wandered around, trying  to make ourselves as conspicuous as possible in hopes of catching the fancy of one of the  of salesfolk - make that saleskids - congregating in clusters around the store. 
     Eventually a youngster who appeared to be just on the other side of puberty came over to us, and when we told him we wanted a desktop computer with, per my desire, a disc reader and portal for a memory card adapter, he glanced at his cell phone - I figured either to gather some product information or to to do a quick check of his social media status - then led us over to a row of tall box-shaped apparatuses.       

      Apparently these boxes are the actual computers, the screen - or monitor, in the lingo - now comprising a separate purchase,        
         Our sales youngster showed us this model, the HP tower Pavilion tp01-2234, 

...which he assured us was a very good model, and then he gave us a fast-paced sales pitch covering  gigabytes, drives, systems, specs, data, analogues, access, optics, mega-pixels, vectors, blue tooth, and whole lot of other relevant information, while I nodded, glassy-eyed, as if it weren't all just a bunch of techno-Greek to me. 
      "I see that this one does have a disc reader," I said when our kid paused a moment for a breath, "but how do you open the tray? I don't see a button anywhere."
      The three of us, Tom, our sales kid, and I, then went on an investigation of this                               HP Pavilion tp01-2234, each of us checking all the sides and the back for a button to open the disc tray. We then took turns pressing on the oblong door of the tray, likewise without success. Our sales kid pulled out his cell phone to look for some guidance, but, finding none, he went off to look for human help.
      He returned with an older and presumably wiser sales person, who did a repeat of our hunt for an "open" button, after which he pressed several times on the tray door just as we had. Then he came up with the answer.
       "When you get it home and powered up, the tray door will open when you press on it."
       Now, if we had been thinking clearly and astutely, Tom and I would have picked up that there was something fishy in this explanation. But I, for one, was so anxious to just get the computer and be done with it, that I swallowed the fishy explanation of this purported expert. 
        Our sales kid then went on to advise us on the purchase of a monitor screen and a keyboard, as, he informed us, the HP Pavilion tp01-2234 desktop did not come with a keyboard. However, he assured us, the items would be bundled, which, he explained, meant we'd get a discount on the whole purchase. Whatever, I thought.
       So we bought our computer, keyboard and monitor, along with a year's worth of Microsoft Word and a two-year warranty, all bundled together.
        Our first surprise came when we opened the box containing the computer and found that the HP Pavilion tp01-2234 in fact did include a keyboard and mouse,

...which meant that we'd have to return the separate keyboard that our sales kid had told us to buy.
​    Our second surprise came when we powered up the computer, ​

...and found that, press the disc reader tray door as we would, it still wouldn't open.
           I consulted the internet but could find no information on how to open the disc door. While I was cogitating over this dilemma I received a call from my sister Romaine, another of the family's computer engineers.

        I explained to her the problem we were having trying to open the disc reader tray door. She had an idea of wherein might lie the solution.
     To be continued...