I have this theory that people who are out and about before 11:00 am, at least in this neighborhood, are crazy. The longer that I’m working retail the more first-hand evidence of this I collect. Want an example? Not two minutes ago I was waiting on our software to finish loading so [...]

I try not to judge people who come into the store, seeing as how I don’t really have data points to work with save for our brief interactions, but occasionally a customer is particularly chatty. Usually I get nothing more than mundane details about somebody’s life or comments about the news, but the other [...]

One of my housemates secured me a job interview at a company that, wonder of wonders, would be stable and career-oriented. At the same time, the cancerous rot that’s entwined with the franchise store I’m working at has begun to metastasize. I’m not going to go into any details until it’s all finished [...]

The crap surrounding the Attorney General and the seemingly political firings at the Justice Department just got a little more interesting. You can read the article at the New York Times, and it’s a good article, but there’s something quite subtle in there. Here’s the opening paragraph.
WASHINGTON, March 13 — Under criticism from [...]

The STEREO-B spacecraft had its cameras calibrated on the 25th of February, which is unremarkable save for the capture of a lunar transit of the sun.
This is what an eclipse looks like from space.
The lunar disk was filmed to provide a baseline level of dark for the calibration of the STEREO-B camera, which orbits the [...]

I’m beginning to really despise Time Warner Cable, and yet I can’t exercise the consumer privilege of switching providers. Time Warner holds a de facto monopoly on cable broadband, and DSL? Kind of hard to get a DSL when one doesn’t have a telephone landline to begin with, and naked DSL isn’t offered [...]

We rent mailboxes at the store, so we get a lot of people who mask their true address by renting a box for official correspondence and abandoning the box when they’re done with it. I’ve had to return child support notices and jury summons to sender and accept court summons for box-holders. Shady [...]

Inane self-help programs come and go with boring regularity, so I didn’t think anything of the most recent grist in the mill. What little I had seen convinced me that it was just the same old crap repackaged with some brazen DaVinci Code-esque packaging. I shrugged, went on with my life.
Yesterday I visited [...]

One sees some strange things when working retail.
An elderly man came in, smelling strongly of fried chicken and mumbling to himself while pulling a folded slip of paper from his wallet. I gathered that he wanted some copies made, but then he started to say “onion skin” to me repeatedly, how he needed the [...]