Tuesday, January 10, 2006

It All Started with a Pair of Sneakers

You know those days when you wonder, sometimes out loud to no one in particular, if God is really out to get you? Those days when you feel like you're His chosen pest to be smited for the day? Those days where you'd rather be buried in a pile of monkey feces than stuck in the situation you're in? On second thought, if your days are ever so bad you'd rather be covered in monkey poo, something is a little too wrong.

Once work ended yesterday, the frustrations began. I forgot my running shoes so I couldn't go to the gym (it's really hard to get a good run in wearing dress boots). Seeing as I wasn't going to be exercising, I thought I'd run over to Best Buy to make use of one of the preferred customer coupons I had. 10% off of any movie, video game, or cd. I don't really like buying things at Best Buy if I don't have to, but I thought I'd take the plunge, make use of a coupon, and pick up the Aeon Flux DVD set for Kristin and I to watch.

I scoured the DVD racks looking for it only to come up empty. Sure, they had plenty of copies of Monk, Friends, and the A-Team, but no Aeon Flux. Even in the anime section, which I thought some idiot might have put it into, was lacking the bright white casing of the Aeon Flux set. There was plenty of anime about robots and little girls in skirts, but that wasn't what I was there for.

Now, as I was looking not a single employee came up to me asking if I needed help. It never fails that when you actually need help, they're going to avoid you like you're walking around nibbling on the corpse of a dead baby. After the longest time, I managed to snag a worker and asked him if they had the DVD I was looking for. Apparently they had two copies.

We both looked through the DVD section which I told him I'd already looked in while he was no where to be found. He then said that since they just got shipments in that afternoon it might be in the big crate of DVDs to be organized in the back. He said he could look for it, but that it might take him forever to find. I really didn't want to wait so I asked if he could just fill out a rain check so I could pay for it now and pick it up when they finally got their crap sorted out.

That poor guy. He tried and tried to get a rain check printed out for me, but since it was for a product not in the weekly ad or on special the system wouldn't print a rain check. It just kept flashing the same error message at him, like it was consciously telling us to piss off.

Fed up, grouchy, and unhappy that one of the few times I actually WANT to spend money at Best Buy, they somehow find a way to make it so that I can't. And they wonder why they are so universally reviled by savvy consumers.

Wanting to do something productive, I headed to the post office to mail some packages out. Upon approaching the post office, the traffic was backed up down the road. Great. There must have been an accident. Except there wasn't. There were just that many people trying to get into the post office that traffic was blocked. Lord knows how long you'd have to wait to mail a package once you got in knowing it would take probably 15 minutes just to park somewhere.

I gave up. Couldn't go to the gym. Couldn't buy a DVD. Couldn't mail my packages. Couldn't do anything. That big pile of monkey dookie was starting to seem pretty damn appealing. And then a train happened.

That's right, I couldn't even drive home without somehow getting screwed around with. What're the odds that there'd be a train crossing the frontage road by highway 14? I'm assuming small, so small that this had to be a purposeful act of God to see if He could somehow drive me to acting out my deepest, darkest Carmaggeddon fantasies, but I resisted. Somehow the blaring of As I Lay Dying kept me from cutting more than few innocent people's lives short.

As I got home, I headed straight down to my room, wanting nothing more than for this whole fiasco of getting home to be over. I needed a break to lay down, catch my breath, and stop imagining how awesome it would be to carpet bomb Best Buy's corporate headquarters. But even my peaceful time at home was ruined. It was freezing in the basement and the dog had decided to eat on my slippers while I was at work yet again.

In conclusion, Best Buy + the post office = the anti-Christ. Don't question my logic. This is an a priori truth. The end.

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