Bah, I was grumpy yesterday afternoon. I supposed I had a case of the Mondays. Plus on the way home I left my car's gas cap sitting at the gas station. Not I have to go to autozone and fork out 12 bucks for a new one. Either that or find another Saturn and steal theirs. Hmmm.. Anyways, I got home, ate some more of the same chicken soup I have been eatig since Sunday and will probably keep eeating until tomorrow, then crawled into bed at 8:30 or 9. Just one of those days I wanted over.
Hmm, Woot.com has not one but two wireless usb adapters for 10 bucks. True, they are only 'b', but that is still a great deal. I do not play online games so B is fast enough for me. I think I am going to snag them. Shipping is only 10 bucks.
My allergies have been going off this month. Not surprising considering that 'winter' is actually just an extended version of Florida's fall. On top of that some lady in my office has some new baby-powder perfume that has been making my allergies go haywire. I do not like the smell of baby powder. I find it too strong and it feels like someone grabbed a diaper and shoved it against my face so that I am smothering in it. However, the lady is really nice so I am not going to say anything to her.
So this morning I popped into CVS to pick up some Clairton. Clariton-D, actually, which is simply Clairton with psuedoephidrine in it. Because of the horrible meth epidemic that is washing over the south, ruining the teeth and bodies of our once fine strippers, anything with psuedoephidrine in it is now 'over the counter' so that meth-chefs cannot buy large amounts of it to make meth.
So now when I buy my pills I have to take pull a little card off the shelf, and bring it up to the old lady at the counter. I then have to wait roughly three days while she drags out a little footstool and hobbles up to a high shelf to get the package down. I then had to turn over my license so she could write down my address and the quantity of pills I was buying.
I did not really like that part because I fear that my info will then be fed into a computer. And we all know how trustworthy computers are. Some six dollar an hour data entry dude's finger might slip while he was shoving a burrito in his mouth, and next thing you know I am showing up on the sherrif departments meth-chef list. Then one day I will be sitting in my kitchen in my underwear eating a bowl of cornpops and reading the funnies when suddenly my door will explode in, a flash bomb will go off, and I will suddenly find myself on the floor with a gun pointed to my head while a dozen SWAT team officers swarm my house.
COP WITH GUN: Where's the cooking equipment, you dirty meth-head??
ME: I don't know what you are talking about!
COP #2: (walking out of my bedroom with a pair of skid-mark stained underwear on the end of his nightstick) Look's like we got a real sicko here, chief.
COP WITH GUN: (shoving gun harder against me head) You people are disgusting!
On the bright side, I am going to take Friday. Three day weekend! Whore-ray!
2026 Update
Setting the clock for 12/5/2006, where a missing gas cap, a meth-card ritual, and an 802.11b deal all await.
Twenty years on, this post is practically a museum exhibit. Ed's car is a Saturn, his gas cap is free-range, and his big connectivity purchase is a pair of 802.11b USB adapters from Woot, because 'B is fast enough.' The entire infrastructure of daily life has been swapped out: gas pumps now demand payment before you can even think about leaving a cap behind, though modern cars tether the cap anyway; Woot's single daily deal feels like a quaint ancestor of infinite flash sales and subscription boxes; and a computer-phobia about your name landing on a 'meth-chef list' reads adorable next to a world where every pill purchase, web search, and grocery loyalty card is vacuumed into data vaults. The pharmacy ritual of the little card and the old lady's footstool may be dying, not because the law changed but because more sinus remedies are either behind a phone app or abandoned altogether. And taking Friday off? That was Ed's victory lap, a tiny rebellion against a world that still expected him in a cube. The baby-powder perfume, sadly, has not evolved.
“2006 Ed, is the real moral of this story that you trusted a 'B is fast enough' wireless adapter but not the pharmacy computer, and did you ever go back for the gas cap?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, you got me there. Yeah, I guess the moral is that I’ll trust a ten-dollar wireless adapter that probably came from a dusty warehouse in Taiwan, but I won’t trust some poor data-entry guy with a burrito and my address. That’s just the way my brain works. Computers are great until they’re not, and then you’re getting flash-banged in your underwear over corn pops. And no, I never went back for the gas cap. That thing is gone, probably melted down into a hubcap by now. I keep telling myself I’ll hit Autozone, but I’ve been driving around with a little piece of electrical tape over the hole like a true genius. So far, so good, but if my Saturn decides to become a rolling barbecue, I’ll know why. For now, I’ll take the three-day weekend and try not to think about it.
