Re-gifting

 It was Jami's birthday yesterday, and the best present I got her was actually one I'd given her years ago.  It's a nifty little CD player that they don't make any more that has ridiculously good sound for such a small package:

It broke a couple of years ago and the CD got stuck in it, so it has sat unused in her office since.  I determined to see if I could get it fixed.  This, as anyone who has had an outmoded piece of electronics break down, is no mean feat, but I found a place that said that they'd look at it, only it would cost $80 just for them to diagnose it (although if I decided to go forward, they would deduct that from the repair fee), and they were so backlogged it would take them 6 weeks even to look at it.  I took it apart myself to see if there was something obvious wrong with it, but no luck, so I determined to take it to them.  The thing is, this place was in somewhere called "Madison Heights," which, it turns out, is one of the many featureless suburbs of Detroit (think of it as like Crawley is to London), which was not that much further South than Rochester Hills, which is where I go every month or so to shop at WholeFoods and Trader Joe's.  (Now you will understand the reference in last Friday's post.)  So, continuing my subterfuge (I'd got it out of Jami's office by asking to borrow her key to look for a particular text book to use in my teaching) I "went shopping."  Well, best case scenario: because I'd opened it up, instead of him just taking it and dumping it in the back of the shop, he was able to see the problem (a missing tiny belt) at a glance, and fixed it there and then, charging all of $5!  Plus he was a real character, chattering incessantly about W.C. Fields and one of the retired guys who used to hang around his store (which he inherited from the old guy who opened it about 80 years ago) who turned out to be the chief sound engineer for Motown and had all kinds of stories about the legendary scheming and tightfistedness of Berry Gordy.  So, Jami has her working CD player back again.  (Not to worry, I also spent the money I saved on more books than she will ever have time to read, so I didn't cheat her.)