As previously mentioned, our router is on the fritz at home. So on my way home from work I suffered a fatal thought- I’ll just swing by the BestBuy and pickup another on my way home. Quick, easy, simple,,, and perhaps the most idiotic idea I’ve had in ohhh ever.

Logically I thought, eh it’s the day after Christmas, surely it won’t be THAT bad. Yeah I can hear you all giggling to yourselves and if you could see me you would also notice that I have a giant pink flashing neon dumbass sign clearly posted on my forehead.

As if that genius idea wasn’t bad enough I then weighed my BestBuy options. We have two here in town, both of course situated on the same roads as our major malls, but on opposite sides of town. I call A1 at approx… 3:45 and tell him I’m leaving work and running by the best buy. From my office on any normal day it should take me about 10 minutes to get to the one I’ve chosen. At 4:15 I call him back, I have chosen incorrectly it seems and I am now stuck in traffic literally miles long. How bad is the wireless I ask… Perhaps I can just run out tomorrow as everyone in the damn city has decided today is the day they all need to go!!! They have new game systems, dvd players, tv’s that all need things lots and lots of things!!!! The router is only allowing at most 5 minutes of connection however, and I personally need the internet. I may not be on it all the time, but by god if I know I have no online ability it feels as though I am trapped, trapped in a world without color, without email, without taste or sound. So I decide screw it, I can do this! I can make it thru the crowds, thru the idiots I shall have internet when I go home!!!!

Inside best buy is a madhouse. It’s like you took 1000 people and told them all they had one goal, to wander thru the store as if they’ve never been in one before, to pickup and touch everything, to walk so close behind you that you can feel them breathing on the back of your neck and then to promptly see where you are headed and make every effort to actually put themselves as much in your way as humanly possible. At one point an employee who looked as if he’d been running with the bulls at pamplona all disheveled and slightly sweaty and wild eyed had to move one of those giant rolling ladders to get something for another customer. Of course giant ladder is directly next to where i am standing weighing my wireless options. Of course he CANNOT WAIT IT MUST MOVE NOW. So i back up and directly into the man standing behind me not doing much of anything except perhaps checking out my ass, except he was far to close to get any kind of decent view so who knows what he was actually doing. Mr Employee of the month then proceeds to lift the breaks on said giant ladder and start to roll it not realizing that another employee perhaps in the same frantic people people everywhere! mode had stacked the top of the thing with boxes of assorted crap. I say assorted crap because as it was falling like giant electronics box rain all around me I couldn’t actually focus enough to tell WHAT was in the boxes.

At that point I was flustered, pissed off and tired of people being all up in my space. I grab the closest router that I can, thinking I know exactly what i’m picking up. I then proceed to the checkout line which wraps around nearly half the store and stand there with people still all crowded on top of me- it was like being tailgated without the cars. If they just got that much closer to me then they would and could make the line go faster. Another 15 minutes in line and finally finally i am at the checkout. That’s when I realize that the router I have picked up is not the one I thought it was. It was in the wrong place, so yeah it will work, but it is one of those badass wireless for miles models that does WAY more than I need and is way pricier than I wanted. I said fuck it, I think out loud even, paid for the damn thing and got the hell out as quickly as I could.

Moral of the story, I will not ever ever ever again visit bestbuy for the full 7 day week proceeding or following Christmas. Ever, not even if I’ve got a million dollars to spend on whatever shiny pretty new anything I want but only if I go to the store during those two weeks. Ok maybe for a million I’d do it again, but I would be the rudest pushiest on the news tackling people bitch in the place.