The Aerie
So far so good. Relaxation at 100% and holding. I am avoiding becoming
involved with the politics and dramas unfolding around me by applying
the philosophy of "I am a chip of wood floating down the river." It
works really well. People start to stress around me, someone asks what
we should do, I just say to myself "I am a chip of wood floating down
the river." I don't care. It's not my problem. I'm on vacation.
Of course, no vacation would be complete without weirdness. In this
case I received a message shortly after leaving home that a Chicago
ABC-TV news station wanted to interview me for a followup to a screed
I launched into the ether some weeks ago regarding ICANN and internet
governance.
Normally I don't know what they'd have done -- either interviewed me
by phone or not at all, or maybe had me go into a local ABC affiliate
and done it remotely? Anyway, it just so happens that I'll be driving
back through Chicago on Monday afternoon. So suddenly I have an
appointment at 1:45 in Chicago.
Of course, if I'm going to be on a TV interview I need something to
wear other than three day old sweatshirts and vendorware from other
companies. So now alluvasudden I have to get a dress shirt and a tie
(at least).
Well, that's not so bad -- I need a new white dress shirt anyway. I've
been suffering a rash of scorchmarks on my shirts, and I'm not sure
where they are coming from. Ironing? That's what I thought, but then
some scorchmarks turned up on a pillowcase, and an undershirt. I
haven't ironed those! So it's either the eleven-year-old dryer, or the
brand new washer. No idea.
So yesterday I skipped one of my games and went shopping for a shirt
and a tie to wear on this interview on Monday. And of course I'm
stingy, because I'm broke, and I want a good price.
I started with the local campus menswear store, the Tall and Snooty
shop. They showed me a dress shirt for $58, but curled a lip and
suggested the $115 model, rahlly. Man, I don't know what kind of weed
theyre smoking. Maybe college lads preparing for their first job
interviews can be bamboozled into buying a $115 dress shirt, but if I
paid that much I'd expect the shirt to include satellite TV and
electric heating.
Then I headed over to Kohls. For $20 they offered a shirt that
appeared to have been stitched together from white packing tissue, and
felt like it too. It was so thin you could see the threads of my
undershirt. No thanks.
Finally, I head over to Target. In their limited menswear section I
come across my goal: $10.48 on sale, nice fabric. Perfect. Now for a
tie. I look around. I must be missing them. There are Christmas boxers
and twenty shelf-feet of leather belts, but I can't find the ties. I
pick up the Target Help Phone, and a cheerful computer tells me to
push one and then to push two.
"Now paging a team member!" she perks.
A moment of silence.
"MENS!" she bellows from the earpiece, as I feel my eardrum ricochet
off my uvula.
"MENS!" she cries again. I hadn't realized that the computer was going
to page personnel out of the telephone handset.
"MENS!" she shouts. I hold the phone up so that any team members in
the vicinity can hear the cry, and wonder why I didn't follow my
original plan of just shouting "Could someone help me?" Of course, the
team members are probably trained to only react to the keyword "MENS!"
She shouts "MENS" for two solid minutes, and then the line goes dead
without a word, as if the computer has suffered a seizure and fallen
over.
Nothing happens.
I take another pass through the section. No ties. I try the phone
again. Two minutes later, the magical invocation has failed, and no
employees are visible.
Finally I walk over to the dressing room attendant and ask her if
anything is supposed to happen after I use the Friendly Target Helpful
Help Phone of Help.
"Aw," she says, scraping the barest film of buttery consolation upon
the unsalted cracker of her concern, "We're real understaffed, they're
trying to save money."
According to my brother in law who works for Target's labyrinthine IS
department, Target just posted its third-straight profitable quarter.
But in the Target on Ann Arbor-Saline road (named for the artesian
eye-drop well that makes Ann Arbor the Mecca of allergy sufferer's
everywhere), the economic recession is in full force.
So failing to find a tie (and thus doomed to visit yet ANOTHER store),
I make my way to checkout. There they have one of those new
credit-card boxes that eats your card when you arrive and gives it
back after you sign.
"Fifteen forty five," says the girl behind the counter, and the box
lights up for my signature.
"That's not right," I say, "The shirt is $10.48."
She gives me the look that underpaid cashiers everywhere give to the
odd nut who fails to properly complete the ritual. Here she was, all
ready to send me off with a deeply insincere and passionless
"Havaniceday," and I've broken her rhythm.
"What?"
"The price is wrong, the shirt is $10.48." Behind me exasperated
shoppers are starting to put the items on the belt back into their
carts. My left arm and shoulder are encased in the ice of their
glares.
"Was it on sale?" she asks with the resignation of someone given the
choice between ice- and boiling-water enemas.
I briefly ponder what difference the sale price would make, but ask
instead, "Well, can't you re-ring it?"
"Naw, the shirt is already sold. That's why you gotta sign the credit
card."
I look down. The box smiles at me in expectation of producing an
inaccurate, jagged representation of my already slapdash signature.
There is no cancel button.
"I have to sign this?" I ask incredulously. In response the girl turns
and insolently throws the switch on her aisle light. It begins to
blink, the coded signal for "Troublemaker, send goons." She picks up
the phone.
"Yeah," she drawls, "I got a customer who says the price is wrong.
Yeah, he already bought it." She hangs up. "You gotta go to customer
service."
I raise my dispairing eyes to the sight of the purgatory that Dante
never trod, the Customer Service desk at Target. The throngs there
differ from those waiting in line for a Buchenwald shower only in that
they are clothed; their hopeless gazes are the same.
I still haven't signed the card, so I ask to speak to a manager.
Another call, a five minute wait beneath the froglike stare of my
nemesis the cashier, and a perky young woman arrives. She brims with
glee. She bubbles with delight. In a warm and sincere tone she repeats
almost verbatim the words of my surly torturer: You've already bought
the shirt, you have to sign the card, if there's a problem we will
deal with it at Customer Service. Have a nice day.
I sign the card.
Unable to resist her indoctrination, the cashier tells me to have a
nice day, although the tone of her voice suggests that the words "in
Hell" are only being choked back with difficulty.
Customer Service is still as crowded as the lobby on the morning after
Eid at the Mecca Holiday Inn. I swing across the store, back to the
desolate steppes of MENS! and confirm for my self that I am not wrong.
The sign is still there. The shirt is $10.48, and I don't have the
wrong tag or the wrong shirt or anything. Armed with the sword of
righteousness, I make my way to Customer Service.
I was just finishing War and Peace when I got to the front of the
line. The man in front of me couldnt understand why Target wouldn't
take back the $58 X-box game that he had bought. Upon learning that
his GameCube would not read the X-box disk (imagine that!) he had
hurried it back to Target for an exchange, only to learn that they
didn't accept open packages. I suppose someone in corporate was
worried that the purchase had been digitally duplicated, although why
you'd go to all the trouble to steal it from Target when you could
simply download it off of Kazaa is not clear. Possibly the Target
policymaker had no idea what Kazaa is. Possibly he or she is not a
computer nerd.
Anyway, my predecessor departed with his $58 coaster, and I presented
my case. I showed the paper where I'd written down the real price and
the code. Regardless of my statement, the matronly woman behind the
counter was forced to believe that I was a hamfisted liar and thief,
attempting to score $3.50 of cash out of Target, for only a two-hour
investment of time. Deploying one of the nonexistent MENS sales
assistants to verify the price only took another 20 minutes, not
counting the time necessary for thawing them from the carbonite.
When she discovered that i was NOT lying, that the sign actually did
proclaim the exact price that I had only verified myself, the service
representative summoned over the manager and the cashier. The three of
them together threw themselves to the floor, salaaming grievously and
apologizing for assuming that I was a lying thief. My money was
refunded to me, and a gift certificate was added thereto, in order
that I might again consider patronizing their humble establishment.
"What?" I said, snapping out of my reverie.
"This is a same-day purchase," she said, "We'll have to cancel the
transaction and re-ring the shirt."
"In other words," I said, "I may have used a bad card that will
bounce, and if you refund the difference I may get away with $3.52 of
cash from a bad card, as well as the shirt."
"Yeah," she said automatically, involved in re-ringing the shirt.
Man, I am the most determined, persistent thief of $3.52 that I've
ever met.
Finally an hour after entering the store, I leave with my shirt,
having avoided paying an extra $48 by investing an hour of my vacation
time.
And I still needed to buy a tie...
"I am a wood chip upon the river of life... I am merely a wood chip
floating down the river of life..."
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Posted by Albatross at November 24, 2002 12:00 AM