Shopping Update

Thank y’all so much for offering to help find a little CD player for me. I’ve actually decided to just go with the computer. Or, rather, I was forced into this decision, but it was exactly what I deserved. Because? I shopped at The Dreaded Wal-Mart.
Omigod. I go for weeks, sometimes months, without going into that place. Never mind that The EGE shops there and that it’s the closest store to our house. Never mind that. When I go there, it makes me question my will to live. What is it about that place that draws the very worst of our species? And then brings out the very worst of those people while they are there? What IS that? It’s like it sucks out every vestige of thoughtfulness and compassion and turns people into loud, greedy, selfish Shopping Machines.
Not to mention the Pure Crap that you buy there.
I go in and am surrounded by the rudest people on the planet, human beings who think nothing of standing in the middle of the aisle with their three loud, smelly, sticky children, talking to their friend/sister/neighbor who just happens to also be at The Dreaded Wal-Mart with her brood, blocking the aisle completely because of course they’re all HUGE and always dirty and so you don’t really want to try to get past them. I swear everyone drives from the trailer park out in the county to the Dreaded Wal-Mart in their big truck, bringing with them every stray relative they can fit in. It’s an adventure, going to The Dreaded Wal-Mart! I don’t know why they don’t sell popcorn.
You say “excuse me,” and sometimes this works, but often it doesn’t. Because many of the people do not understand you.
And that’s another thing:  the new Dreaded Wal-Mart here, the one closest to our house, is like a store in another country. You can go through the whole entire store and never hear a word of English. Even the Dreaded Wal-Mart videos are in Spanish. 
But the rudeness. Eeesh. It’s not just at The Dreaded Wal-Mart. It’s everywhere. And, you know, I’ve had it with rude people. I was raised to be polite, and Being Polite included not saying anything to other people who were NOT being polite. So if someone is rude, you’re supposed to just smile that tight little thin-lipped smile and walk away.
“Consider the source” my mother always said. It was her second-most-oft-repeated bit of advice, right after “Always wear good underwear in case you’re in an accident and they have to take you to the hospital and cut it off.” I always figured that if I were in an accident that was so severe that they had to take me to the hospital and cut off my underwear, whether or not I had on Good Panties was going to be the least of my worries, you know?
But for years I took her Consider the Source advice. I would just smile tightly and edge away.
Fuck that. Somebody has got to start pointing out to people that they’re being rude.  And I’m the perfect one to do it:  I’m at that age where women are supposed to be bitchy as hell, and people are frightened of me, anyway, what with the hair and the tattoos. And the constant talking to myself. I’ll be perfect at it.
So we’re at Starbucks yesterday afternoon (I’ll get back to The Dreaded Wal-Mart here in a second), and we’re sitting outside, talking. No one else is around. And one of the workers, on break, this sullen-looking young girl with a limp blonde ponytail, comes and sits at the table next to ours and lights up a cigarette. And I look at The EGE, and he looks at me, disgusted. He loathes cigarettes. But he’s very polite.
I used to be.
I lean over and say, “Hon, would you mind moving over there with the ashtray?” pointing to the table on the other side of the patio, which does, indeed, have an ashtray.
Now, technically, I was still being very polite. I called her “Hon,” instead of, oh, I don’t know:  You Selfish White Trash Skank. But if you’d asked my mother or my husband, I had  Crossed a Line. I was, perhaps WAY too subtly, pointing out to this person that it was rude for her to have come and sat down beside us and lit up, when were obviously not smoking and didn’t seem to be suffering smoking withdrawal and so therefore did not require help in the form of her blowing her smoke on us.
It’s not much, but it’s a start. Someone has to say, “Hey. That’s rude.”
And she said, “Sure,” and moved away. Not that we couldn’t still smell her smoke, but even I know that you can’t very well say, “Hey, would you mind getting in your car and driving out into the country and parking out on a dirt road before you light up?” Too bad.
Anyway. Back to The Dreaded Wal-Mart.
So I go and find a CD player. It’s perfect:  about 1/3 of the size of the one I had. Separate speakers, so I can attach my own. Cute! $40. I stand and look at it, thinking about whether I really want it or not. The EGE points out that I’ve used the other one, the one that died, every night for years when I do yoga. If you use something every day, it should be OK to replace it, right?
He says he’ll pay half. Well, you can’t beat that. So I buy it. I bring it home, I set it up, I dick around with it for half an hour trying to get all the settings to work, since the “instruction manual” isn’t, and it doesn’t tell you how to make the damn thing work. And then I realize that I’m going about it all wrong:  when the little light is on, that means the player is off. And when the little light is off, that means the player is on.
Who knew?
Yeah: I should have packed that sucker up and taken it back right there.
So we start out in a bad place, but it improves: it plays my CD, and the speakers work, and all is right with my little yoga world.  Yowza.
So the next night I come in and turn it on and get on the mat, and about 2 minutes later, it quits. I get up and start it, and it says there’s no CD. I tell it, “But you were just playing the CD, you moron.”
It adamantly insists it has no CD.
I take out the CD, turn off the player (the light goes on). I turn it back on (the light goes off!) and put the CD back in, only now the little door doesn’t want to open, and I have to do it manually.
Oh, you know where this is going. The thing is fucked unto the lord, and it won’t work. I piss around with it some more, and finally I just give up and take out the CD and put it in the computer and listen to it that way. Sure, it doesn’t have fake surround-sound speakers. And sure I have to screw with Rhapsody and Roxio and the Windows Media Player, none of which do what I want to do, which is:  just play the damn CD without taking me through 50,000 options. I finally find Real Player and put a quick launch buttons on the toolbar, and I think it’s going to work out. Crappy speakers in just one little corner of the room, but what am I, anyway? Yoyo Ma? I’m not an audiophile. I just want some music to calm me down enough to do spinal twists.
I took the player back and got a refund, and that went really smoothly:  the guy was nice, the line was short, everything was easy.
Whoa. I could have been at an actual Store, where customer service meant something!
You know why? The kid at the counter was left-handed. Yes. I’m sure that’s what it was, because I have had just the very best luck in the world with left-handed men this week:  the insurance inspector was left-handed. The first siding guy was left-handed. This clerk was left-handed. And they weren’t just left-handed, in the new way where so many people use their left hand but do it so smoothly it’s like using their right. No:  these are all guys who are the old kind of left-handed, like I am, people who curl that arm up over the top of the paper and look like they’re going to break their wrists writing. It’s the most awkward position in the world, but I think it does something to you:  I think it makes you more careful and efficient, is what I’m thinking. You go to all the trouble to hook that hand up over the top of the page, you’re not going to be pissing your time away. You learn to do it and do it right and get it over with. Hooking that hand is bad enough when you’re young:  if you have to write for very long that way, you get cramps. But once the joints start to go? Yiiiii. I’d rather pull hairs out of my nose than write by hand.
Well. And isn’t that a lovely image? I think I’ll leave you with that.
And with this:  I didn’t take my own advice Not to Shop. On top of that, I went to The Dreaded Wal-Mart (and don’t you love how I so helpfully always mention its full name, just like the guy in Turkey, Texas, who made sure always to refer to himself fully as A Retired US Marshall?) and bought electronics, which is pretty much like buying uranium from Delbert, down at the tire repair shop. In short, I got off way, WAY easier than I deserved.