To the last detail

My current desktop computer was assembled by a local builder to my specifications, largely because if I'd bought all the parts myself and done all the scutwork, it would have saved me a whole fifty bucks and cost me the remaining skin on the knuckles of at least one hand.

Still, this is relatively easy to do for PCs: you pick a box and a board, snap in a CPU, add peripherals, get the freaking operating system installed on the fifth try, and you're done. It's decidedly more difficult when you have to select a consumer product that doesn't afford you a choice of interchangeable options; you have to be able to specify exactly the performance level required, and harder still, you have to be able to convey that specification to a retail person who's about to go on break.

If ever I have to do this, I want Sarah Bunting by my side. Here's how she went shopping for a cosmetic I think of as simple but she recognizes as incredibly nuanced:

To me, this seems infinitely more complicated than, say, "512 megabytes of SDRAM".