Mike's computer on his lap where it belongs.

In 2009 we bought a laptop from Leclerc and at the time of purchase we made a point of asking that the Windows Seven operating system would be in English and we were assured that all programs these days are multi language. Wrong, computers  in France are sold with a basic program  only in French so we took it all back and said, no good. The assistant held onto the laptop, did us an update and we found we were cooking on gas except that Mike realised the keyboard has a different configuration but as he does not wear stiletto heels and touch type whilst taking down short hand it really did not matter.   A year later Microsoft asked us for a current licence number, but the number we had was for the original French version of Windows Seven so we took it back and the assistant again did the work and all was well until this year when Microsoft declared that the program is still not genuine and we needed to buy the licence. To cut a very boring and not very life in France story short we took the laptop back, explained the plot so far  and found ourselves invited to talk to the store Director, Manager to you and me but never the less it was starting to look a bit serious. We asked that Leclerc buy the licence and take responsibility and we left the PC with strict instructions that for security reasons we would need to understand what they planned to do to get legal. We returned yesterday to pick up the PC but it had been transported out of store to god only knows where to be investigated and when I asked how long this might take we were told could be three weeks. After we had insisted that we should be consulted on the movement of our precious PC Mike blew a veritable  fuse when we were told it was gone . There was an exchange of words in the store and Mike used his best English  Mr Angry vocabulary and promised to be back to see the manager in the morning as he was conveniently out. This morning we returned and marched into the office and were catapulted into a tirade of argumentative discussion where the manager asked what right we had to interfere with the way he was running Leclerc and that he was tempted to call the gendarmes and have Mike escorted off the premises for swearing abuse at his floor assistant yesterday. Mike welcomed the opportunity to talk to the gendarmes as we all knew that something very sinister was going on and Leclerc were either covering their tracks or trying to get the original assistant out of a job. I cannot tell you the abuse and unbelievable attitude we were subjected to until I shut Mike up and quietly explained to monsieur le director in my very best French that we were the customer here and do have the right to know where all our data is. His response was that Leclerc had strict rules about keeping the law and being respectful and they would never, ever steal data from anyone’s PC….but, they might load some pirated software, and I guess that would be OK then.   Mike is now without PC and is seriously not happy. I have used my French to it’s capacity and I am hungry for more. We await a call tomorrow to let us know when we can go back in to resolve the issue. Actually now I have tasted blood in battle I am quite looking forward to it.

To get over our little ordeal we went to the local depot vends for a bit of cheap retail therapy and found this fab coffee table. This table is completely HOSS tail friendly and we have somewhere to keep the collection of controllers we own. Mike is still leg up after his op but things are a little better and next week we hope to be back on form, with Mike's computer on his lap where it belongs.