Many things

Many things have happened since last I wrote.

Some weeks ago, we went to Sam's Club, where, among other things, we had the goal of getting passport photos taken. Neither of us has an active passport, and we've had the passport applications on my desk here for a while, so we figured we should get that process started. Anyway, this meant we had to deal with the people at the Sam's Club photo center. A little word of caution: if you work at a Sam's Club photo center, and you're capable of such complicated tasks as, oh, opening a browser to this page and reading this, you're more intelligent than the employee we had to deal with that day.

Suffice it to say that we waited an hour to get photos that were blurry (mine) and scaled incorrectly (Wife's). When I pointed out that we simply did not have time to restart this process, as we had a cart full of rapidly defrosting food, our employee wrinkled her nose and said, "well, it is a one-hour photo lab." Of course, the photos were taken with a digital camera and printed from a computer, which does not take an hour, but it DOES take an hour when it takes you forty-five minutes to realize you forgot to put the proper photo paper into the machine.

So we just left, furious, and got home, where Wife called the Sam's manager and told her what an incompetent halfwit he had working for him. He apologized and offered to refund our money and retake the photos for free. Great.

We didn't get a chance to get back down there until last weekend. When we got in the door, we went to the customer service desk and explained the situation. The CS woman paged the manager, and we waited and waited and waited...so she paged him again. Again, we waited...until I finally just said, "why do you need him? Just refund our money, please." Which she did. So, okay, halfway to victory here. She took us over to the photo lab and explained that we were owed free photos. The photo lab employee said "okay, but we don't currently have a camera."

! I said "so how are you supposed to take passport photos?" Her answer, of course, was something like "Duhhhhhhh..." It was kind of hard to understand her with her finger up her nose to the knuckle. She suggested that she could scan in our old photos and blow them up. Okay, great, I said, but can you get rid of the blurriness on mine? Well, uh, no. So, once again, we left empty-handed and frustrated at ourselves for returning to that idiot hive.

So Sam's photo center is now 0 for 2. At least we got our money back. Costco, I'm begging you, please come out here. If you need a place to build your store, maybe we can blow up the Sam's Club and you can build there.

On another topic, last weekend I bought some new shoes and pants for work. I got some "clog-style" Oxford shoes that are awesome. There are no laces on them; rather, tension is applied to your foot through a pair of elastic straps that hold the tongue of the shoe onto your foot, and they are the MOST COMFORTABLE SHOES EVAR. Seriously, I've never had a pair of shoes that were so foot-friendly before, especially right out of the box. They weren't particularly cheap, but they were worth it.

So I got that going for me. Oh, I understand that the bookstore in the upscale shopping mall just a few minutes up the road from us is hosting a book signing by...a gangsta rapper named Master P today. Apparently he learned how to write, or at least to ghostwrite, and he has released a book. Which he'll be signing in person today...just a few minutes from the house. I can't imagine how many gangsta thug types will be swarming on this part of town this afternoon. Oh goody.

Man, I'm glad I bought that shotgun :)