A rare item

I went back into Akihabara to do a final confirmation before ordering the speaker. Sometimes, a batch of identical items comes in at the same time, one shop usually doesn’t want them all so the seller has to divide the sales between several shops.

I’ve often found a particular computer I’ve wanted suddenly come it to Akihabara in quantity and the same model, usually offloaded from a large corporation appears an virtually every shop at wildly varying prices.
The HTM2 might be the same, I considered. The price was reduced so much from the original that maybe there were a truckload of them.

So I went into a few other shops and asked them, “So, do you have any second hand B&W HTM2s in stock? Not being a particularly funny person, I was surprised by the response…
“Hahaha! HTM2, Second hand?”
“Yes.”
The staffer looked at his colleague and both smiled at me like I was about… oooh 12.
“I’ve worked here for 3 years and never seen a second hand B&W. Once someone buys one, they never sell…”
So after being laughed at I ran back to the first shop in anticipation.
“Can I order the second hand B&W HTM2.”
Now since Japanese do not distinguish between “the” and “a” there was some confusion.
He replied, “But we don’t have a second hand B&W HTM2 for sale”. My heart sunk. Had I just missed the speaker I’d been hoping to find for the last three years?
I pointed to the bargain basement model on offer on the top shelf.
“Oh thaaaat?” he said, laughing, “That’s not second hand. Don’t you know, you can’t get secondhand B&W centre speakers! It’s still unused, from a shop that closed down.”

Smashing! I bought it there and then.

Of course I still had to carry the beast home, in 36 degree sweltering Tokyo summer heat!

Three Years of Searching Over

I cycled into Akihabara for the first time in… I’ll have to check my blog… a long time, anyway. I was on my way home and was cycling past a second hand hifi shop when I got the strangest feeling…
I immediately remembered what had happened to me in Sapporo with a CD I’d been searching for for three years and getting a tingly feeling when I walked past a second hand CD shop, so I parked the bike and dashed in in anticipation.

Bang! There it was, sitting on the shelf waiting, the B&W HTM2 centre speaker I’d given up looking for about three years ago!

Now that’s just freaky – 3 years of searching, over.