a miracle!

let me tell you how good life was to me today.

maybe some of you remember reading a few posts down that our video mixer had died in february. we brought it to the store where we bought it, and learned that it had to be returned to the producer, edirol, in england to be repaired.
our model had — apart from having a hole cut in its side for reasons i won’t bore you with — gotten quite battered over the past years and the warranty expired ages ago. i was amazed i didn’t see a few raised eyebrows at the music store.
now let me mention that that mixer still costs around a thousand bucks new. we couldn’t afford a new one, and i wasn’t sure about the repair costs either. but we left the mixer to be sent to england for repair because we needed it, figuring we would worry about how to pay for this later.

this morning i received a phone call, and when i answered it someone identified himself as an employee of our music store, and asked if i had brought in a v4 video mixer for repair.
uh oh, i thought, here goes. i don’t even know where next month’s rent will come from and now i will have to pay a few hundred bucks for the mixer repair.
the guy explained to me that the mixer hadn’t been repaired. for some reason it would have been necessary to forward the mixer to japan for repair, and edirol seemingly assumed that it would be cheaper to send a new mixer instead. so there would be a brand new v4 model for us to pick up today.
i think at that point i started to stutter and stammer badly, before finally getting around to the question of how much that would cost.
“nothing. the company replaced it. it’s free.”
i checked the calender. yup, april fools day was four weeks ago, i was right about that. part of my brain still refused to believe that we should get a brand new replacement model for a battered old wreck that had been years out of warranty. so we headed out to the store, and after showing our return receipt we walked out of there with a brand new v4 mixer.

i’m still dizzy. but happy. this feels like christmas. life has been very good today.

photo by c. löser via wikimedia commons

~ by bine on April 29, 2008.