• Be afraid. Be very afraid.

    Something very strange has happened to me this morning. I had settled down into what had been a pretty typical rainy workday morning. I was peacefully plugging away at my desk, quietly jamming to the output of my too cool iPod, when suddenly, and inexplicably, I find my desk eerily barren. My pile of emergencies is gone. My low priority problem pile has similarly vanished. My shelf of garden variety incoming work is empty. There are no flaming emails in my inbox. Most of my coworkers are out of the office, so there are few questions to be answered.

    So what the hell do I do now? Worse, this will end; and when it does, will it be three times as bad? Is someone, somewhere, saving up their work to be delivered en masse with vengeance upon my poor unsuspecting desk – now made unawares due to this unexpected lull in the action?

  • Loss

    It was a relationship that survived the milestones of young adult life. We got together in the fall of 1989, my first semester at the University of Florida. We shared countless drives across the state, traveling home from UF and back again. We were together through graduation from UF, a move to a new city and the first real job, and a marriage. We rode in the car together when my first child came home from the hospital. We took vacations together; visiting family in New England and Louisiana, hiking through the woods of Florida, Georgia and New Hampshire, and sampling the better life at some of Florida’s finest resorts. We’ve stayed together through the mundane: countless commutes back and forth to work, weekend errands, and weekday evening trips to Walgreen’s for that overpriced refill for a prescription medication.

    Yesterday afternoon our relationship came to an end.

    I was getting settled in my car, in the parking lot at work. The sun was shining and I reached for my trusty, yet grossly out of fashion Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses. I pulled the earpieces out to hook them behind my ears, but I stopped short. I heard a metallic snap and watched as one of the glass lenses fell to my lap. The wire frame had snapped. They would never again support the weight of a glass lens perched on my nose. I went to Costco and picked out a discounted pair of designer sunglasses to replace old faithful. When I got home, my wife exclaimed, “Hey, those look a lot better than your old Ray-Bans. You look sophisticated.”

    Is there no one that feels my pain?

  • Further evidence of the decline of western civilization

    Alternate title: the shopping curmudgeon strikes back.

    Vision statement: we hold these truths to be self evident, that retail, in general, sucks.

    Hypothesis: the lowest form of humanity in the “new releases” section of the evolutionary ladder is Homo Sapiens Salesman.

    The evidence: a phenomenon we call “Acute Idiopathic Phantom Price Shift”, or “AIPPS” (pronounced “apes”).

    AIPPS typically strikes when a consumer is shopping for a product of moderate or high cost. An example would be high end mattresses. Say your typical consumer walks into a mattress showroom and evaluates some of the product. Your typical salesman might encourage the sale by suggesting: “the model you’re looking at is on sale, but the sale ends today.” The consumer might turn around and ask the salesman what the price will be tomorrow, after the “sale” ends. This is where we really separate the men from the apes. If the salesman is displaying the classic signs of AIPPS, he will say something that really sounds like it answers the question, but doesn’t. The most common example is the following response: “the sticker price on this product is….” What the salesman did not tell the unwitting consumer is how often he actually charges the “sticker price.” Instead of telling the consumer what the price of the product would be tomorrow, he evaded the question by playing on the consumer’s pre-conceived notion of what a “sticker price” represents. Bad salesman! Bad!

    Why is it I ALWAYS show up to buy a product on the last day of a sale? Is this some kind of fantastic coincidence? Is there a different “sale” for each day of the work week; or, am I just being lied to?

    Is it any wonder I don’t care for shopping?