tales from the rock

so I went in to CompUSA today.  usually, I avoid stores like that like the plague since the prices suck, most of the employees are stupid* and/or don’t care about what they are doing, and even on the rock, the internet makes most small item brick and mortars obsolete.

I was going to be in the vicinity though due to an issue with my Sprint phone (another story), and thought I’d try them to solve a quest I’ve been on.

I’ve got a lot of DVDs.  To store them, I tried the binder route, but that’s expensive, and it’s a bitch to handle a 200 DVD binder.  from there, I resorted to spindles.  mostly because I’m lazy.  the problem with the spindle is that it’s impossible to find anything, and searching through the stack fucks up all the disks.

some dude online showed how he used those vinyl/tyvek sleeves to store his entire collection, including art, in neat alphabetized boxes.  you can’t ‘page’ through a collection, but it’s easy enough to shuffle through them, they are all protected, and might actually take up less space than a couple of binders.  all I needed to try this out was a couple hundred sleeves.

what does this have to do with a crap-ton?  I’m getting there.

I actually rolled in there yesterday (the first time I went to Sprint), and I gotta say, the store has cleaned up a bit.  not as much ‘crap’ as I remember, but still, nothing compelling.  it’s not like Fry’s where I could go and browse.  I went looking for the sleeves, asked a couple of clerks (what? I don’t know what that is), found one guy who knew what I was talking about, but insisted they haven’t had any for 6 months.

oh well, no surprise.  amazon will come through as always.  got them priced, ready to order, but wait - my fucking phone is still broken, so I have to go back to Sprint.  thought I’d browse the CompUSA site just for fun, when lo and behold - 200 sleeves for $16.  now if only someone there could find them…

I roll back in, and let me tell you - the people that work at a place like this during the daylight hours are scary.  these are the ones NOT going to school or some other shit during the day.  this is it for them.  that said, I was pleasantly surprised by the girl that noticed I was looking for something, and offered to help.

now, she wasn’t hot or anything, but she’s already well ahead of the game by appearing interested, and offering to help.  I tell her my story, give her the item number I pulled off the internet, and she started her own search.  not on the shelf (which is where the first dude stopped), so she decided to also look at the website to get a better idea of what she was looking for.

about this time I was wondering, what the fuck is this girl doing working here?  I’m pretty sure the pay sucks, the company is known to shit on it’s employees, and she must take all kinds of abuse from idiots who go to the store and ask dumb questions.

anyway, she finds the pic, looks up some shit in another computer, and discovers there should be hundreds of these things in the store, and figures they must be ‘in the back.’  so, like a champ, she says she’ll get them, instead of feeding me the normal bullshit line, ‘all we have is on the shelf.’

it’s on her way to the back that she drops the line - “I’ll go get you some, we have a crap-ton back there.’

I can’t explain why, but for whatever reason, I was very sad for her at that moment.  she’s still doing a great job, clearly one of the best employees that store will ever see, but like her co-workers, this is as good as it’s going to get.  Meg Whitman doesn’t stand up to deliver the annual report and drop lines like, “this holiday season, we did a crap-ton of business.”

there is a line in the sand, and successful people fall on one side, and everyone else on the other.  certainly, there are different levels of success, and being on the other side doesn’t mean you live in poverty, but ‘crap-ton’ puts you on the side you don’t want to be on.

just goes to show you, nothing good can come out of a visit to the Sprint service center.

* by stupid, I mean not as smart as me when it comes to technology.  it’s a black and white definition.

long day today.

started off with a call from a friend - not someone I talk to often, but someone whom for whatever reason I’m pretty close to.

a few months ago, he sent his oldest daughter off to start college.  last weekend, he sent her to rehab.

this guy has a lot of experience with this.  his family has what you would call a genetic predisposition to addiction.  on one hand, he can calmly and analytically deal with this problem.  on the other, he knows that she has virtually no chance in this life.

there’s always hope - that’s what people like to believe.  work a program, follow some steps, and you step into ‘recovery’.  here’s the reality for him;  3 siblings, 2 addicts, 1 already lost to suicide.  one uncle OD’d.  another killed in a DUI.

here’s how his worst fears are confirmed.  campus police calls him at 3:00 am to report a misdemeanor possesion charge.  the reason he called was because he observed his daughter in an alley with 3 boys whom she did not know.  the observed interaction suggested she was not in control of the situation, and during the investigation, the officer determined she was not in control of her own actions. 

so now instead of the beginning of her adult life, he faces the beginning of a second childhood - one that will never end for her, and won’t be much fun.

how do you deal with the loss of a child, when you know she’s never going to leave?