How the cold affects people.

Before enlightening you all on the negative effects of cold weather,
I'd like to run off on a tangent (yeah, like I never do that).
Sometimes I just feel really cool at my job. This morning, I had a
9AM conference call with come colleagues. I ran the meeting and so I
called each person and pulled them into my "audio conference room".
One guy was in South Africa. One was in England. The last was in
Kentucky. Just before the meeting started I sat and thought, "wow, I
have 3 other people hooked into my phone and they are all in
different parts of the world from me." Anyway, I thought that was
cool.

So back to the matter at hand. The cold. It makes people crazy
(Charles Manson crazy, not Britney Spears crazy). You see, I am also
a crazy person (Spears, not Manson) because I love to go shopping on
Black Friday.

I spend my entire Thanksgiving Day morning just tearing through sales
papers for places like Best Buy and Circuit City. It's an art. You
have to find the best deals. you have to plan your attack. You have
to...stay up all night? aw crap.

What I've found in the past is that you can really only go to one
store and get great deals. So I made a complicated excel spreadsheet
listing the items I liked at each store. then I list their beginning
price, their mail-in rebate amount, and the final cost after savings.

I then use my super computer (read: E-Machine 2.6GHz Celeron) to
evaluate the data and decide which store will give me the best
over-all deals. After that, I factor in what stores my family
members are going to, and what the lines are like each year (I've
been doing this for a while).

(Have you noticed I haven't gotten to the cold part yet? Are you
surprised?)

See, Best Buy always has some great deals. Really cheap computers
and software items that are free after the rebates. This year,
however, I decided on Circuit City. Now, I'm certainly not
advocating Circuit City over Best Buy...but it worked for me on one
day of the year.

This is how it happened:
From past experience I know that people
start lining up at Best Buy before midnight on thanksgiving (doors
don't open till 5:30 AM). Over the years, though, I've noticed that
people don't start lining up at Circuit City until 4AM. So I decided
to sleep a bit longer and go to Circuit City. When I arrived at 4,
the Best Buy line had wrapped at least half way around the entire
building (it would wrap all the way around before the doors opened),
where as I was 20th in line at my store. I dragged Dottie with me.
We were freezing and comletely unprepared for the cold weather (who
knew it would be below 75 degrees that night?). Some people had
sleeping bags. Some sat in their cars. Others brought tents...

But I'm skipping the point. It was cold. Your face gets numb.
You're feet start to hurt. You get grumpy and whiny (I didn't get
grumpy or whiny...but dottie did).

And then it happens.

Someone cuts in line.

...and all hell breaks loose. This year, a fat (FAT, not PHAT) black
girl stepped in line a few people ahead of us (can I say black girl?). She
didn't know anyone. She just casually walked in and stood there, not
talking to anyone. Now, I wasn't buying anything huge so I didn't
care...but others did.

It started as whispers, "hey, was she there
before? Where did she come from? Someone should ask her." Then
someone gets the courage up and talks to her. there's no response.
Maybe she doesn't speak English....or maybe she's a bitch! Well, one
old woman wasn't going to take it. For the sake of the Story I'll
call her Grandma Oldest-Woman-Alive (Granny OWA, for short). Well,
Granny OWA decided that this girl wouldn't get awway with it. She
stepped in and talked to Fatty McFat girl. Let me tell you, there
were words exchanged that I will not repeat in this blog. But the
old woman wasn't backing down. She yelled out to the line for
support: "Hey everyone, this girl here isn't in line! She just
walked in! Feel free to just step past her! Don't worry...not in
line! Keep moving up!"

This fueled the crowd. People began yelling. People started
pushing. Fatty just yelled back "you don't know me! so don't talk to
me!"

It was getting ugly. There was about to be NJ's first lynching
since... well, in a long time. We were right between the girl and
the crowd...and all hell was about to break loose. I was just getting
ready to sacrifice dottie to the crowd and run for my life when the
girl got out of line and walked away. Thank God. Crisis Narrowly
averted.

So anyway, we went shopping. It's like a kid in a candy
store...people everywhere yelling and grabbing stuff. Lines forming
everywhich direction; some ending nowhere near a cash register. But
we got out alive, and I had family members at Best Buy who purchased
things for me. So that's my tale. Try shopping next year...it's
fun. See ya tomorrow. God Bless, and good night.