It’s big and red

OPINION: Welcome to the launch of the Rabid Reseller PC. It’s great to see so many people here, I guess the word got out that we’re paying for the beer.

Well before you get too excited, the stuff you’re drinking is Rabid Rotgut, my very own home brew. You didn’t think I was going to pay for grog did you?

Hope you enjoy the canapés. They’re meant to be crunchy, but that’s what happens when you doggy-bag them from the vendor’s gig and re-heat them in the microwave. But the nurse says they won’t actually kill anyone. Please don’t smoke while waiting in the queue for the toilet.

Now to the real reason we’re all here today, the fantastic new Rabid Reseller PC, which is really going to set the industry alight, and probably a few customers, let me tell you.

Everyone is bored with beige PCs and we got sued by that fruit company last time when we made them transparent, so this time they’re red. That’s right, Rabid Reseller Red PCs. Nice colour don’t you think?

We chose red because it’s the universal colour for danger, and these PCs are mighty dangerous. We wanted to be able to sell them at a good price point, so we had to cut a few corners inside the box. For starters, there aren’t any fans in there so it runs nice and quiet. We nobbled the fans on the CPU and the graphics card too. But it does get a tad hot.

Now you’ll notice there’s a depression on the top cover that’s the right shape for your coffee mug. This PC runs so hot you’ll never have cold coffee again. In fact, you don’t need to boil the kettle, just put the International Roast in the water and park your mug on the PC. Within 10 minutes it will be ready to drink. Don’t forget to point that out to customers. It won’t be long before the competition copies our ideas, so we need to make money out of that first-mover advantage thing.

We also saved some money on the CPU. We’ve bought up a truckload of old PCs from primary schools and ripped out the 486 chips.

For you lot up the back of the room, that’s the CPU that was around before the Pentium, and before you were born. Now you might get customers asking you about the performance, but we’ve already got that sorted.

There’s a Pentium PC in the shop, hooked up to the internet by modem, so just show them how long it takes to load up a web page on that, then take them over to the Rabid Reseller Red PC and they’ll see how much faster it is than that Pentium rubbish. Don’t get bogged down talking about the Ethernet cable on the back of the Red PC, that’s not important to customers.

Customers might also ask you about this ‘authentication’ message that keeps appearing on the screen, so just explain that it’s one of those annoying viruses that will go away in about 30 days.

There’ll be a small extra charge for a new copy of WinXP when they bring the PC back to get it fixed, but we need to establish a continuing relationship with our customers -- one based on them visiting the shop regularly and handing over their cash.

I almost forgot one last little detail that you need to know. Don’t touch the case of the Rabid Reseller Red PC while it’s operating. Those power supplies from the old Atari PCs seem to be suffering from a bit of insulation breakdown. Tell the customers it’s a security feature. If anyone tries to steal the PC they’ll get quite a shock. And it keeps their snotty kids from prying inside.

Yes that’s right, the price tag says $299. Keyboard and mouse extra, of course. And no monitor for that price either. Don’t forget to sell them an upgrade to a hard disk as well. The dual floppy-model is what we call ‘entry level’. Plenty of opportunity for us to enter their wallets and relieve them of that spare cash.

That’s enough waffle from me, so get back to work and start selling. I’m expecting to shift a couple of hundred of these in the first week.