hello, my name is Emmy and I am a U-scanaholic. I love me some u-scan, it’s the single best thing that’s come to our little BFE Kroger/Meijers and Walmart. It allows me to avoid all the checkers and all the lines that form filled with people who fear the u-scan. Sure there are occasionally the moments when you get stuck behind the grandma who decided she’d really like to try this new fangled thing out, but that happens so rarely that I don’t let it phase me much.

Then there are the u-scan disaster moments. Really I think this could all be solved with a little u-scan etiquette. For example, say your local store has 8 total u-scan machines, 4 for small orders (12 items or less) and 4 for large orders (no limit). All four of the small order u-scans are functioning, while only 3 of 4 large order ones are currently working. Reading that back I realize is sounds like the start of a high school algebra problem, but I digress. Lets say it’s also about 5:30 in the afternoon on a Monday, which means the grocery store is packed with all of us trying to pick up a few things on our way home. Also available for the checkout purposes are 6 open lanes of actual checkers.

I go to wait for a large order scanner, I had about 20/25 things and while I could have snuck thru the small line I’m just not an asshole. In front of me occupying the three working scanners are- at scanner one the woman with TWO FULL SHOPPING CARTS of groceries. Now I KNOW that the scanner says unlimited but for fucks sake really? Not only that but she’s not even going with any type of speed. She literally spent 10 minutes doing nothing but talking to some friend that wandered up to her during her scanathon. At scanner two we have the teen mother her child and what appears to be her mother. they apparently have forgotten several things while shopping so the old mother wanders off several times while they’re at the scanner to get things scattered all around the store, like eggs which are the far back corner, and then bread which is the OTHER far back corner. She then finally gets all her random things, then has to scan her beer which her teen daughter of course can’t touch. then she remembers oh yeah I need smokes so she tracks down the single uscan attendant to walk to the other side of the damn store to get her cigarrettes. I do believe that I would have finished my checkout and then just walked my own happy ass over to the customer service desk to buy them. But again I apparently have common sense and courtesy which other people seem to lack. Finally at scanner three are the young couple who for whatever reason have decided to scan their items in as 3 seperate orders. Which means they scan about 10 items, pay, pull them off the scale, rescan their shopper card, scan 10 more things, pay and repeat.

It was kinda like the moron trifecta.

Anyone else noticed the sudden influx of Amway commercials? Well I should get with the times, they’re now Quixtar, formerly Amway. Either way I do believe they are a giant scam machine and I’m a little confused that suddenly they’re on every channel from TLC to MSNBC. Multilevel marketing my ass- pyramid scheme is more like it but whatever.

Then I saw Billy Mayes, the Oxyclean, orange glo, infomercial god selling health insurance. WTF? Apparently this man has the capability to sell everything I may ever need. This is why I skip commercials 98% of the time

I use Facebook, in fact I use it more than myspace. Mostly because myspace never really grabbed me and it’s kinda become a pimps n ho’s, listen to my crap band, I am a comedian be my friend kind of place. Any site that lets people add annoying music and fucked up formatting to their pages can suck it.

So today I am shopping for A1’s birthday present which I bought on overstock.com. I am in one tab buying his stuff, and in another tab logged into facebook. Next thing I know Overstock has somehow magically managed to post in my facebook newsfeed that I just bought x and y from Overstock.com esentially blogging to the world exactly what I just bought from overstock when I bought it and how much it was. That my friends is a little too much for me. I even closed facebook out and logged back in before i removed it from the facebook newsfeed cause for a minute I thought I’d lost my damn mind. Yeah I hadn’t there it was for all the world to see and neither facebook nor overstock had happened to mention in any thing I saw that they were somehow linked up.

After some research using “the google” I learned that overstock uses a facebook beacon. This is from what I’ve read a little code snippet that creates an overstock cookie on my machine when I make a purchase. This cookie then gets picked up by facebook (I think cause I was using the same browser for both) and BAM there is my purchase info suddenly thrown right in to my newsfeed where all of my friends including friends of A1’s could easily read it.

Here are my thoughts- this is fucked up. I love all my friends, I love the facebook but I think it’s pretty damn shady that all of a sudden any of the sites that are partners with Facebook and use their beacon can suddenly automagically pickup and update my profile with things I may not want my friends/co-workers/former co-workers to see. The people in my facebook friends list include former bosses, and lots of former coworkers and while this time is was just a birthday present from overstock and I caught it right away, what if next time it had been a newsfeed that “spinster Emmy just purchased a 17″ double headed pull start gas powered dildo at $49.95 and a ball gag for $14.50 from monkeyfuckers.com” (this is a random site name I’ve made up so I do not know nor do I really want to know what that site may be but I’m sure it’s something that you can’t unsee). This is NOT the kind of information I just want thrown up in my damn profile for all to see. This is especially true since I hadn’t noticed anywhere on the overstock site during my searching or purchasing any relation to facebook so had I not happened to be on a screen where I promptly saw my facebook newsfeed I could have gone hours without knowing it had been done.

Now of course I plan to be uber paranoid and anytime I buy anything online I will promptly check my facebook profile to make sure it’s not been published to the world. shady Shady facebook/overstock