OK, perhaps “shaky” is too strong a term, but consider:
I recently ordered a high-end office chair from a high-end store for my high-end office, aka “my bedroom.” Yesterday the chair arrived. A hole had been punched in the box, and a handle used to make one of the many high-end adjustments had broken off. So I’ll be getting a new chair next week.
I also recently ordered a box set of Mozart’s “Haydn” string quartets and the six quintets, ostensibly by the Guarnari Quartet, with Kim Kashkashian handling second viola on the quintets.1 The set, which is very cheap, gets rave reviews on Amazon, but when I loaded the discs onto my computer I got several unwelcome surprises.
Putting the worst first, the first two “Haydn” quartets—nos. 14 & 15—aren’t there! What is supposedly disc 1 contains nos. 18 & 19, which are also on disc 3, where they “should” be! I can’t believe that all 18 reviewers missed the fact that they were listening to the same quartets twice, which means (I guess) that a recent “run” of the discs proved faulty. Thanks, Sony!
Also, my computer tells me that the quartets aren’t by the Guarneri at all, but rather the Salomon String Quartet, so I don’t know if Sony fraudulently packaged the Salomon as the Guarneri or just inexplicably screwed up the coding on the digital files. Either way, well, unimpressive.
Finally, my dental insurance company’s website tells me that they have phone reps available ten hours a day. Well, if you can get a live voice from them, you’re a better man than I. They did send me an email saying that I could access my benefit statement online. Except that when I click on it, the fucker won’t load.
On the bright side, Mozart is still killing it, even with nos. 14 & 15 not presently available.
Afterwords
To avoid being totally obnoxious, I didn’t do the Köchel thing. So you should thank me.
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Kim is listed on the box in 4-point type and absolutely nowhere else, as far as I can determine. Being second viola is the worst. ↩︎
