Tag: shopping

My Boomer moment

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

My wife and I went to Best Buy last night– I tell you, date night has gotten really lazy lately– not because we particularly needed anything from there but because they’d sent me an email that I hadn’t used my card in a long enough time that they were going to close it out soon if I didn’t use it again. I don’t have any particular need for anything from them right now, but that card has come in handy plenty of times and there’s no reason to take a credit score hit in six months if we decide we need a dryer or a new TV or something. She wanted a new paper shredder, which we weren’t sure if they even carried, and I went in just intending to find literally anything I wanted, buy it on the card, leave, and immediately pay the card back off.(*)

This should have been easy.

I considered a few random things and then Bek found paper shredders and we decided to just grab one of those and call it a day. And we walked to the front of the store, where the registers have been for as long as this store has been there … and there were no registers.

We eventually noticed two signs hanging from the ceiling that said “Checkout,” both located in the middle of the fucking store, like we were in a fucking department store or something. One had no employees anywhere near it. The second just appeared to be a sign dangling randomly from the ceiling, with nothing at all to indicate where one might make a purchase. No kiosk, no computer, no self-checkout, nothing. And, again, in the middle of the fucking store. Why? Why the fuck is checkout in the middle of the store and not up by the doors?

The customer service desk was still there, clearly labeled for returns and Geek Squad and online pickup and such, but no signs for purchases, and the couple of employees behind that counter looked straight at me, a customer, clearly carrying a rather unwieldy box with the intent of purchasing, and didn’t, like, wave me over, or point me at where to go, or anything like that. We probably walked around, again, carrying merchandise, for five minutes, unable to figure out where to buy something in a fucking retail store that only exists to sell things, and at that point I decided I’d had enough, left the paper shredder on a random shelf and walked the fuck out of the store. On the way home we stopped at Target and bought a different paper shredder.

And, I gotta tell you, I didn’t believe any of this was happening while it was happening and I only barely believe it happened now. If it had just been me on the trip I’d just assume I was some variety of idiot and not worry about it. But my wife was with me, and she couldn’t figure out how the hell to give someone money in exchange for goods either, and that tells me I’m not fucking crazy. That said, I’ve been scouring the internet since then trying to find other people complaining about this and I can’t find any– there are tons of complaints about their website having issues but no one else saying I went into the story to make a purchase and couldn’t find the registers, which just … God, that just sounds insane. Selling things is the only reason the store exists. This cannot possibly have just happened. This isn’t an “I couldn’t find someone to unlock the case” situation. I had the thing I wanted in my hands and could not find a place to get someone to sell it to me.

What the fuck, Best Buy.

(*) The punch line to this fucking ridiculous story is that after hitting Publish on this post, I went and looked for the email, wondering what the deadline was and also trying to decide if I wanted to still keep the card (surely I can just order something online without drama, right? A PS5 gift card?) or just let it go … and I can’t find the email. My personal email is through Gmail. I have never deleted an email. So maybe I am completely nuts.

In which I’m in a better mood

On By Luther M. SilerIn life

My son’s best friend currently lives in Indianapolis, and she was in town overnight last night, and today we met her mom in Kokomo to hand her back over. For those of you who don’t know Indiana geography, Kokomo is more or less a halfway point between us, and it’s also the site of several cons I was a vendor at back when I was doing that. The guys who run Kokomo-Con have a comic shop, and two doors down from the comic shop is a fairly massive vintage toy shop, and a couple doors down from that is a used bookstore, with a used record store in between that we didn’t go into because I am not about to bring physical music media back into my life. We spent … I dunno, probably close to a couple of hours browsing between the three stores, and I somehow didn’t manage to spend any money despite finding any number of things I could have bought.

The copy of Iron Man #1 — the real first one, from 1968– was awfully tempting, especially since I’ve now spent some time looking through other listings for that same book and the $660 they wanted for it either indicates a hell of a deal or terrible condition. It wasn’t graded and obviously I didn’t take it off the shelf and look through it, but that’s always been a book I’ve wanted to own. If I was into Westerns I would have been ecstatic about the used bookstore, which had tons of series paperbacks that probably cost a quarter when they first came out. I always go looking for old Tor Conan books from the 1980s and early 90s and I can never find any, and it was the same here.

Three different $1000 Funko Pops. I don’t even remember what they were. That bubble’s got to … uh, pop soon, right?

Anyway, we came home and I took a nap until around 8, and now I’m up and if I wasn’t sitting here in front of the computer I’d be pacing around trying to decide if I wanted to do anything with the rest of my evening or go to bed. Spring Break is basically over at this point since we just have the weekend, and I have stuff to do on both days, so we’ll see if I’m a maniac on Sunday or if I manage to stay calm for the next couple of days. After that, seven weeks of school and then year 19 is in the bag.

Should be manageable.

First World Problems

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy

This is not a post about my stupid YouTube channel, although I’m not gonna lie: it’s related. Part of the reason I started the channel with Little Nightmares II specifically is that LNII is a game that isn’t especially challenging on either my PS5 or my computer. I wanted to start off with Sekiro, but I couldn’t get the Elgato and the computer to play nice with each other, and any time I tried to stream or record anything complicated it came off really blurry and ugly with tons of frame drops and stuff like that. Little Nightmares II recorded very smoothly, so I figured I’d start with that, and then I embarked upon this ridiculous stream of minor and major upgrades to my system to get everything working the way I wanted. New HDMI cables were the first move– I have learned so much about cables in the last two weeks that it’s flat-out absurd. I had already been looking for an excuse to upgrade my desktop’s memory, since it shipped with only 8gb, so I fixed that next, upgrading to 40gb. When that didn’t make any difference, I spent last night researching the USB standard.

And … Christ.

Long story short: there are a mess of overlapping standards for USB, both the ports and the cables, and then there’s Apple’s own answer to USB, which is the Thunderbolt standard, and even that has a couple of different versions out there. As it works out, my computer has a spare Thunderbolt port available, which supposedly can push 40gb a second? That’s … a lot, so I decided to upgrade the USB cable today.

And I don’t think the story’s funny enough to recount in full, but doing that required the following steps:

  • Ordering a proper 6′ cable from Target to pick up in-store, then getting an email an hour later that they didn’t have the cable after all, sorry about that;
  • Ordering the same cable in 3′ length from Target to pick up in-store, then getting an email an hour later that they didn’t have the cable after all, sorry about that;
  • Ordering a 6′ cable from Staples to pick up in-store, then buying it and noticing in the parking lot that it was clearly not the right cable, as it advertised “up to” 500mb per second, and I don’t know how much you know about computer measurements but 40gb is literally eighty times faster than that;
  • Deciding I did not have the willpower to return the cable today (I’ll do it tomorrow) and checking Target again to see if they had a specifically Thunderbolt cable, as I realized that that was going to be something completely different;
  • Getting a yes, according to their website;
  • Going to Target and discovering that 1) they did have the cable I wanted; 2) the cable I wanted wasn’t the cable I wanted, as Apple sells both a USB-C male-male cable that isn’t rated for Thunderbolt speeds and one that is, and that one of those is called a USB-C cable and the other is called a Thunderbolt (USB-C) cable;
  • Ordering one from the Apple store on the other side of town for pick up in-store, then realizing they want appointments for in-store pick up and calling the store to 1) make sure they had the cable before driving across town and 2) making sure that I can actually come get the damn thing before my appointment, because I was doing all this while the boy was at camp and the earliest available appointment was right when I’d have to be picking him up;
  • Driving to the mall and picking up my cable, and then getting home and having just enough time to make sure it worked and did what I wanted it to before having to go pick the boy up. I’m quite happy to report that it looks like I’m going to be able to stream and/or record basically anything I want now, although there’s still some weird color issues with Sekiro that I haven’t figured out yet.

Slightly separate issue: the Apple store also has curbside pick-up, and in fact has designated parking spots in the mall parking lot for same, but the Apple store itself is deep enough inside the mall that getting to it from (I think) the closest available external door(*) is a 5-minute walk. Not a lot in the long term, but I wouldn’t want to be the employee who got tasked with spending all fucking day lugging shit from the store to those two parking spots. Not without, like, a Segway or something like that. It’s not remotely as hot here as it is in a lot of the country (particularly the West Coast) right now, but it’s about as humid as I’ve ever experienced, and that would be an “I quit” moment real quick for me, particularly since you know those curbside pick-up people are going to be impatient as hell.

(*) I mean, it would have to be, right? That’s where the parking spaces were. Surely they wouldn’t put their designated curbside spots next to the second closest door, although that might be giving mall management too much credit.

In which I had something for this

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

I’m on at least three post ideas for today so far, and by “post ideas” I mean I came up with something, thought “Okay, that’s today’s post,” and then promptly forgot what the hell it was before I had a chance to put it into writing. So that’s how my day is going so far.

I did manage to get my work tasks squared away early today, by not bothering with the instructional video (tomorrow’s material is the same as today’s, so rather than recording something myself I just linked to someone else’s) and getting the assignment written while working in the Meet and doing other things. Sometimes it’s kinda fun to yell “give me a number!” at a half-dozen kids and then write a math problem about it.

I’m also reaching that point in the week– and it’s alarming to realize that it’s only Tuesday– where my eyes could definitely benefit from doing less staring at screens for a little while.

Actually, there’s this, which I think was one of the things: I had to go to my local Ace Hardware to buy a flagpole earlier, because I’m finally getting around to putting the pride flag in front of my house that I have wanted to put up since last June. And, y’all, we need to protect our retail workers, okay? Because the item I bought ended up not being in their system for some reason, and it took all of five whole minutes before the manager finally shrugged and charged me for a slightly different flagpole (which, whatever; I hadn’t even looked for a price, I just grabbed the one I wanted and headed to the counter) and I think during that five minutes I was apologized to for my incredibly minor inconvenience at least a dozen times by at least three or four different people. And you could just tell that everybody was waiting for me to completely lose my shit about it, and it’s like … yeah, I have so many more important things to worry about right now than this that I don’t even have the energy to reach “this is not your fault but I’m annoyed anyway” level annoyed. Oh, darn, I had to wait five whole minutes.

And you just know that these folks have gotten the shit kicked out of them recently about something similar, right? Because motherfuckers have allowed themselves to get completely out of control lately, and while filming these fools and putting it on the Internet has gotten rather popular I think it might be time to start upgrading to actual intervention. Nobody should be this nervous about this minor of a thing, and it wasn’t just the cashier, it was everyone I encountered in the store.

The flag’s gonna look nice, by the way. We’ve taken it down already to get the folds pressed out, but I hung it up long enough to take a picture, which the wind promptly made twice as complicated as it needed to be. But nonetheless:

In which I am real, real dumb and make dumb decisions like a dumb guy

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

It is known: I am a giant fat guy. I’m five feet ten inches tall and somewhat– I’m honestly not sure how much– north of 300 pounds. Every so often I get tired of being a giant fat guy and try to do something about it, with varying degrees of success, and generally a few months after trying whatever that was I end up fatter than I was when I started, which, frankly, is the main reason I haven’t tried to be less fat in a while.

But, Jesus, this quarantine is too fucking much. I’m barely leaving the house, because disease, and I’m getting zero exercise. I have never been much of a snacker, believe it or not; my issue is that I’ve never been a regular exerciser and I eat a lot at meals, but other than empty calories from pop I’ve not been a guy to eat a lot of sweets or snacks between meals.

I cannot run, and I will never be able to. My knees and legs are all fucked up, and even if I wanted to take up running it would be a terrible idea. I really enjoy swimming, but that would require a gym membership, which is, well, impossible right now, and the last time I tried the only place I could get into didn’t end up working out very well.

So … a bike? My wife and son have bikes. I could ride on a bike with my wife and my son! That would be a thing, right? Pay no attention to the fact that I haven’t been on a bike since I was, like, ten— I learned how to ride, mostly because my brother wanted to and I couldn’t yet and as the older brother I couldn’t allow him to know how to do something I didn’t know how to do– and I’m pretty sure once I knew how to ride on a bike I stopped doing it and that was the end of that. They say you can’t forget how; I don’t believe them.

Turns out that bikes that guys my size can ride can be really fucking expensive, and I fell down a hell of a rabbit hole today trying to order one. An anecdote, if you don’t mind: I drive a Kia Soul. I very much like my Kia Soul, which does everything I ask of it and is missing exactly zero features that I would like for a car I’m driving to have. However, if you read reviews of the Kia Soul from Car People, it will not do well, because car people are Car People and they frankly have vastly higher standards than I do for their cars.

Compounding this is that it turns out that bikes are a rather popular purchase right now, because it turns out I’m not the only person who is noticing that they are rather more gelatinous than they were in mid-March, so they’re sold out everywhere. And when you look at non-Amazon reviews of bikes I can both afford and find, they tend to be from Bike People, and I would like the Bike People to just tell me if the bike is a Kia or not so that I can move on with my life. I called an actual bike shop and talked to a dude for a bit, and he was super helpful but he also said that all of their lower-end bikes were sold and that the one he’d try to steer me towards given my circumstances was going to be a $1200 bike.

Which, no. I just spent just south of $400 on that giant red thing up there, because it’s getting good enough reviews from non-bike people that I think it’ll be okay. (The price aspect is interesting. All of the reviews that mentioned the price mentioned prices considerably lower than I can actually find this or any similar bike for anywhere.).

But, yeah. The Bike People? Jesus. All of the YouTube reviews of it from Bike People are basically “yes, this is technically a bicycle, but only if you replace these seventeen components of it immediately, and then take it apart and dip it in fairy dust and put it back together, then perhaps you could ride it a mile or two if circumstances required it,” and I’m like dude I’m probably going to abandon this idea in a month anyway I’m not spending $1200 on a lark.

Just tell me if it’s a Kia.

I will admit that I also ordered a new seat for it, on the spot, because … well, yeah, that all makes sense, and I want the seat to be as comfortable as possible, and it was $35 so fuck it. The seat will be here on Saturday. The bike … well …

Two different bikes gave me that nonsense upon being put in my shopping cart. I assume it’ll be closer to now than later; if it hasn’t shipped in a week I’ll just cancel it and move on with my life. I know Amazon is kind of slammed with coronavirus stuff right now, but if it’s in stock I’m pretty sure it’ll be here before fucking October.

I look forward to the odyssey it will require to get a bike helmet that will fit my enormous head. I can’t buy hats in stores, y’all. This will be fun.

5:46 PM, Friday, May 15: 1,439,231 confirmed cases and 87,184 Americans dead.

In which I announce a goal …

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading8 Comments

… one which I’m never, EVER gonna pull off.

My unread shelf has been out of control for months (pictured: not my unread shelf) and I have noticed I’ve begun stress-buying things lately; witness my investment in AirPods yesterday and the obscene amount of money I’ve poured into dice in the last week. I have, even considering how fast I read and the fact that I’m not currently leaving the house, far more unread books than I really should have right now.

In the interests of keeping my bank account solvent and my shelves from collapsing, to say nothing of the health of the people working in Amazon’s warehouses, I have decided I’m going to do my damnedest to not order any more books until I have cleared my unread shelf. I do have one currently in transit that I pre-ordered months ago (Daniel M. Ford’s Cheap Heat, out this week and ordered by me in December) but I’m not ordering anything new until my resolve breaks or I clear the shelf. I think it will be the second time in my adult life I have managed to do such a thing.

How long until I break this resolution, do you think?

12:00 PM, Tuesday, April 28: 990,135 confirmed cases and 56,475 Americans dead.

*Cough*

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy

Had to leave the house today to run some errands– two banks, interacting with the tellers through vacuum tubes, the pharmacy for a new supply of my supplemental Yeah It’s A Bad Day Let’s Take These Too brain meds, also interacting through a vacuum tube, Arby’s, where stuff was passed through a window, the post office, where I did actually have to don my mask and go inside, and Target, which was by far the least necessary of the trips but I ordered my stuff online and had them pick them up for me and then when I walked in the kid who had actually done the shopping and was at the register was a former student, so it was literally “Oh, hi, Mr. Siler! Were those AirPods for you? Let me go grab them,” and I was out. I had a mask on for the Target and post office visits– the same one as last time but folded differently, and I was able to keep my pulse under control but I still had to force myself to calm down after the Target trip.

I’m not even sure why I bought the AirPods, although I’ve managed to convince myself over the last few days that they had their uses around the house, particularly now that I never drive anywhere. Listening to stuff in bed is going to be a lot easier now that I don’t have to be tethered to the phone, for example. They’ll make a few things a bit less unwieldy; I don’t know if it was enough to justify the cost but every other damn thing I own has an apple on it so whatever. I have the money.

Since I got home, my stress level has been through the roof, and not for any good reason, although I think it might have something to do with the fact that … heh, yeah, I was gonna say “life felt normal for a while,” except I was wearing a fucking bandanna on my face in the post office and I didn’t go into the grocery store so that I could minimize the number of actual humans I spoke to while I got my brain drugs from the pharmacy, and after I got my Arby’s I ate it in my car in the Target parking lot like a God damned animal rather than going inside because you can’t do that anymore, so no, none of this shit is normal, none of it at all.

(By the way, I cast my primary ballot today, which wasn’t the only reason I had to go to the post office, but still got mailed along the way. After thinking about it for a while, I voted for Warren. I don’t feel bad about this decision.)

I’m gonna play D&D with my wife and son in a bit, and then I’m gonna record tomorrow’s e-learning lesson, and then I’m gonna take one of those happy brain pills and go to bed, and hope tomorrow is better, because I spent two hours this afternoon after I got home sitting in a chair and staring at TikTok and hating every second of it and that is no way to spend your damn time.

Ugh. 2020 is stupid.

6:14 PM, Monday April 27: 985,374 confirmed cases (though I’ve seen reports in other places that we’re over a million already) and 55,906 Americans dead.

New Face, 2019 edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, life3 Comments

I have trouble believing that it has been over a year since the last time I embarrassed myself trying to find new glasses, but it has! And once again, I am bound and determined to find A New Look, even though all other available New Looks make me all itchy.

This was only the first place we went to, so it’s possible that none of these will be the choice, and it’s also still possible that I go with identical frames to the ones I have, because I do actually like my current frames. But what the hell! Let’s experiment! In ascending order of Radical Departure from My Current Face:

Nearly identical to my current glasses, but in blue. For whatever reason, I seem to have decided that gunmetal and/or black glasses don’t look right and so everything I liked enough to take a picture of ended up blue. The only real change here would be the color.

Also, no comments on my beard will be entertained. It was a stressful day.

A slightly subtler blue, and similar lens shape, but eschewing the completely frameless look I went with last year.

Brighter blue, bigger lenses than what I’m currently wearing, and continuing to be half frameless. I like the color of these the most but Bek didn’t like the shape of the lenses.

WHOA WHAT IS THIS MASSIVE RADICAL DEPARTURE WHO EVEN IS THAT DUDE

Still blue, though. It’s all about blue this year.

Feel free to vote, or comment, or whatever, if you like. Ultimately my wife probably gets the final call– she has to look at them more than I do– but I still wanna hear what y’all think.

Bonus picture of the boy, in frames I think I tried on but didn’t have the guts to be photographed in:

He doesn’t get a vote, but these were his favorites.

(Why are they all Oakleys? Good question. I tried on another dozen pairs other than these from a variety of other brands, but these guys seem to have my tastes dialed in, for whatever reason. I didn’t deliberately seek them out or anything like that.)