SHOPPING? OH, NO!
Shopping is not a recreational activity for me. The perfect shopping trip is when I go into the store and immediately find exactly what I need, then go and pay for it, and get the hell out. In the real world, of course, you encounter "associates", if you can find them, who have never heard of what you want, and may never even have heard of what it does. When you describe the desired artifact and its function, you receive a blank stare which tells you that somehow you have unaccountably stopped speaking English and have lapsed into some incomprehensible language from the planet Zebon. This experience, of course, is just one more sign that you are obsolete. The product that you grew up with and have used for decades has been "discontinued", probably because it was useful.
The shopping experience is made even more exquisite when you arrive at the store and find the way into the parking lot blocked by a car in front of you that sits and sits and sits and sits and sits and sits while the driver waits for a parking space to open up near the door of the store. This lazy, clueless bozo could have driven round to the next row, parked, and walked into the store in half the time it took him to park by the door, but he had to keep a line of traffic waiting behind him to avoid walking an extra fifty feet.
I've never invested the time to follow one of these doofuses around, but it wouldn't surprise me to find that they're the same oblivious souls who roll a cart piled high with enough groceries to last a month into the express line, and stand and wait while the checker rings up their mountain of goods, and THEN start writing a check instead of having it all filled out ahead of time except for the amount.
This is what scares me about concealed carry laws. Do we really want these people packing heat?
March 11, 2006