How To Kill Two and a Half Hours Downtown While Waiting For Them To Install Your Replacement Hard Drive...

...just amble into the Apple Store around the corner. Walk upstairs --- somebody is giving a presentation about Aperture, apparently a fancy I-Photo. He is maybe 25 and his students are all geezers. He's a professional photographer, which is probably why he's working in the Apple Store.

...walk across Market Street to the small Farmer's Market in the Jewish Museum arcade. Sample half a dozen nectarine bites. But at $3.50 a pound that's, like, $2 a peach. And it will rot on your counter before it makes it into your granola.

...help a young Chinese woman, dressed in a perky Muni tourism outfit, who is trying to suggest in a non-combative and kindly manner to the totally shitfaced bag of rotting drunken flesh lying on the sidewalk that he might consider relocating his sorry self to a doorway on someone else's turf. He is covered in more vomit than a frat party. The line for the cable cars snakes around and through him.

...pass Tad's, where a SF Steak Dinner Special is now $14.95, up from the $2.95 it was the last time you went there, when you took your college girl friend out for a night on the town and didn't realize that Tad's wasn't probably the impressive night spot she had had in mind.

...stare into the hole in the ground where they are building the Central Subway. What is it about holes in the ground? You never see anything. But you can't stop looking.

...finally get the call that your replacement SSD drive has been installed. And now it begins. Again.