You'd think that any store that equips themselves with a blue light should be able to attract my respect.
But no.
You'd think a store that consistently has diet mountain dew in stock would attract my respect.
But no.

It all comes down to one thing:
God damn, do I hate K-Mart.

I'm all about cheering for the home team. Living less than 7 miles from K-Mart headquarters, I know that shopping at K-Mart supports the tax base of my region. But I still hate them.

Why?
I guess I should list things that a store should never do.

• The first person I see when I walk in the door should be an old man or woman smiling at me, welcoming me to your store. Not a goddamned armed guard. Why the fuck does your loss prevention staff need to carry firearms? I'm all about firearms, but come on, this is completely unnecessary.
• I have two words to describe your store layout: It sucks. Seriously. The aisles are too small, the center ones are poorly designed, and the organization of products just sucks. And if your aisles are already kind of small to begin with, don't put shit in the middle of them. Whatever it is, I never even look at it, except in anger, because one of your slackjawed employees is gabbing away in the middle of the aisle instead of taking a customer down the lane a bit like a smart person.
• Pick up a book on retail sales, and read about this concept called "Facing". Do it to your aisles. Seriously.
• You may be in debt, but you're not helping yourself any by only having one cashier on duty. I've abandoned my stuff (usually in large quantities) in your checkout lanes twice now, and either gone without or gone elsewhere.
• I hate Martha Stewart. I don't know why. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who only got hit with obstruction of justice didn't have much of a case against them in federal court, so it's not that she's a felon. It's that I never liked her to begin with. This, of course, means I don't want to buy shit with her name all over it.
• Please kindly locate your lightswitches, and set all of them in the on position, and replace any burned out bulbs. Your store is lit like a dungeon, and that makes even the best laid out retail look bad. Imagine what it does to badly laid out retail, like yours.
• STOP ASKING ME FOR MY GODDAMNED ZIP CODE. I hate it when your morons look at me like an alien just shot out of my mouth when I tell them I don't want to give them my zip code. Learn something from radio shack.
• Please train your monkeys to at least have a general idea where things are in the store. Granted, there are quite a few knowledgeable ones (there's even a few really good employees!), but many of them are just idiots.
• If you paid decent wages, you could hire employees at the register who aren't smacking gum and speaking in ghetto slang. Cashiers are the face your store puts forward. If that face spends all her time gabbing to the person next to them rather than ringing up my order, that reflects poorly on your store.
• Express checkouts don't go in the middle of the checkout lanes. They go at the ends.
• Mop the damn floors.
• Fire whoever decided that blank videotapes, camcorder accessories, and other such things go a completely different place than the VCRs and Camcorders. Not only is it fucking irritating, you lose the chance to upsell on accessories. Doubly stupid.
• Again, with the accusing stares from loss prevention when I leave. Put them in K-Mart uniform and take away their gun, or explain to me why a store in a suburban area where I don't even lock my doors unless I'm sleeping requires a fully armed guard. Again, I am all about the guns, but at least hire people who can get a CPL. I don't mind that they are packing, it just makes it look ghetto when they're open carrying.
• If you are going to have a march of dimes donation bucket in the entrance, please use official logos and signage rather than coloring your own with markers. It really doesn't inspire trust.

ieee1394: Current remote IRM is not 1394a-2000 compliant, resetting…
ieee1394: Error parsing configrom for node 0-00:1023
ieee1394: Node changed: 0-00:1023 -> 0-01:1023
ieee1394: Node added: ID:BUS[0-00:1023] GUID[0011e606948e0000]
ieee1394: raw1394: /dev/raw1394 device initialized
video1394: Installed video1394 module

CSR ROM Info
————
GUID: 0x0011E606948E0000
Node Capabilities: 0x000083C0
Vendor ID: 0x000011E6
Unit Spec ID: 0x00000989
Unit SW Version: 0x00000100
Model ID: 0x00000000
Nr. Textual Leafes: 2

Vendor: Unknown
Textual Leafes:
Scientific-Atlanta, Inc.
Explorer(R) 3250HD

I'm setting the previous letter friends only as my way of saying thank you to wide open west, so it doesn't appear on google. If you need to know what it said, and aren't on my friends list, comment here and I'll send you a copy.

Winners of the 'fresh young raptors hard action' contest

To: paul@timmins.net
Subject: fresh young raptors hard action

haha, the imagery on this one is.. wow.

First one to cook up something in photoshop or mspaint or whatever that matches the subject line in the funniest way gets mad props.

Based on the ruling in the Second Ruling and Order, issued September 10, 2003, I made a call monday to schedule an appointment for Wide Open West to supply me a Firewire capable cablebox "by any means necessary". So today, I get a call at 8:30, telling me that my appointment was canceled because my current cablebox's firewire ports cannot be activated. The tech on the phone makes up some BS about WoW not having any 1394 capable boxes. I pointed out the FCC ruling, and he didn't appear to care. So I called back immediately, and scheduled an install for an HDTV cablebox. I made sure the lady understood that the only connector to my "TV" (really a P3 700 with 128MB RAM) only supports IEEE1394 firewire. She promised me this is supported on the box I am being supplied.
But since my appointment was cancelled, they couldn't reschedule the install for today. Friday, between noon and 4pm, I'll be getting it. (along with, apparently, HDTV goodness over the firewire port, since that's a basic feature of the box I ordered. Yummy.)

Here's to hoping they don't do something silly again, lest I find my way over to my favorite bookmark.

PS: Yesterday rocked. Those involved know why.