I’ll admit the title of this “Andy Wonders” is a little bit of an exaggeration, but it occurred to me the other day when I was shopping at Target that most everyone has gotten caught shoplifting, or nearly everyone at least in the eyes of the scanners that sound off an alarm when you leave the store if the anti-shoplifting tag hasn’t been de-activated properly. I know it’s happened to me. Sometimes it has happened when I bagged my own stuff at the store, which of course makes me wonder if I did forget to scan something, and then there are the times when it happens after I go to a real, live check-out person, and I’m pissed that either they A) Didn’t scan something and that makes me a shoplifter, or B) They didn’t deactivate the anti-shoplifting tag thereby having everyone look at me as I’m leaving the store thinking I’ve just stolen the latest Taylor Swift CD or porterhouse steak.
What I find mostly, though, is that for all of the times I’ve gone through the scanners and they’ve gone off, or when I’ve seen other people go through the scanners and they sound the alarm, I’ve never seen anyone actually care. I generally just keep on walking, maybe making a motion that I noticed the alarm, but also making the motion and face of “What, I didn’t steal nothin’.” Most other people seem to have the same reaction, and I can’t recall ever seeing a store employee jump to action, yelling “Halt! Thief! We must check your bags because that little metal strip inside your DVD says you are stealing it!”
I’ve never seen anyone really care up until the other day.
There I found myself, about twenty to thirty feet behind two girls as they were leaving, and the alarm sounded as they were leaving the store. Rather than act like 99.9999% of every human being, these two girls actually stopped in their tracks, turned around, and I heard the one girl tell the other “We have to go back to see if they forgot to scan something.” I wasn’t sure if I was proud of the girl for her honesty, guilty because I know I would have just kept walking, or mystified at their decision to verify their purchase.
I also wondered another couple of things. One has always been how those little things protecting the merchandise actually set off the alarm. I mean, I’ve taken them apart and it just looks like a couple of strips of metal in a plastic container. For this post I actually took one apart for you to see, at least the one inside a Reservoir Dogs DVD I had. The other thing was a little more people related, so for this post I wonder: Have you ever gone back into the store to verify your purchase when the anti-shoplifting alarm goes off?
That’s it for this one! L8R!!
No Photoshop. No digital editing. Just a couple of magazines, someone with a weird curiosity, and old-school cutting-and-pasting. There on the table were the magazines and my quick glance brought me Taylor Swift on the cover of Time, and Tony Robbins on the cover of Fortune. A second glance, and then the coffee nearly came out of my nose as I saw the change, laughed out loud, and wondered if either Taylor or Tony would have the career they have if they had a different mouth.
Every now and then for lunch, especially when the household is out of things like chicken breast, ham, or maybe even a leftover from dinner the night before, we break out the peanut butter and jelly. It might seem odd coming from a 40something year old dude, but I still like the standard peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The fact even came up with someone when they asked what I had for lunch one day, and I told them a PB&J sandwich. He initially looked at me like I was crazy, like how could you be having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at your age, but then you could see the look on his face that it sounded refreshing and different, with almost a hint of jealousy that I was enjoying the tasty mix of the creamy peanut butter with the sweetness of the jelly.
So the other day was the 25th of October which means Christmas is now less than two months away. I’m already seeing stories on Facebook about stores that won’t be open on Thanksgiving to kick off the shopping season, and even though I do have my question of their validity, I’m too tired of “Snoping” everything for people when they keep sharing stuff that sounds odd, but with the simple thought that “It sounds good enough for me I’ll share it anyway even if there is not chance Bill Gates will give me money.” Then of course there is the opposite story, the ones how “Store X is the Devil because they will be open on Thanksgiving.”
Maybe it’s because year after year they are the same, or maybe it’s because I’m just not focused on TV any longer when I’m watching TV thanks to multitasking, but it’s been increasingly easy to “tune-out” all of the political ads lately. Sure I’ll see them come on, but even if I’m in the midst of watching a show I’ll immediately zone out of that TV moment and let my mind drift to something more important, something like “To eat ice cream, or not eat ice cream?” Every now and then I’ll pay a little bit of attention, but when they aren’t lambasting the other candidate instead of explaining how they are going to be a better person in charge, they’re saying they will be the better guy and still not explaining how they are going to be the better person in charge. There was a blip when there seemed to be an uptick in the desire to vote or at least listen to a candidate’s message. It was only a few short years ago when President Obama started his campaigning, with a ton of charisma and a message that this will be a better world, but, alas, that hope for change turned into the same bullshit. I’m not blaming the President, I think it’s the system and too many alpha-people who, as much as they say they want to work together, only want to work together if you want to do it their way. (Heavy sigh.)
My favorites on the album, you know, those songs I can listen to over and over again, contain the trio of the title track, “Old Boots, New Dirt” that is another reflective-style song of trying to move on, “If My Truck Could Talk” which is just a fun look at something in your life that knows more about you than you do as well as knows every story of your life (I really love the lines “Anything to shut it up.” and “I’d have to find a river bank and roll it off, if my truck could talk.”), as well as the previously mentioned “Tryin’ to Love Me.”
The album, though, does have its share of happy things in love and living, like the reminiscing of “Down South,” challenges of getting the perfect girl in “She Is”, and what has the potential to be at every country wedding for a first dance or prom come come the Spring, “One Great Mystery” with sure, some sappiness in a line like “If I go first, I will wait for you,” but as someone in love with a girl who makes me happy every day I too wonder often “What did I ever do to make you fall for me?”