So last weekend was Thanksgiving weekend up here in Canada, which means I took a break from my blog.  This week it’s just late.  My apologies.

Every so often when I go out to purchase something, I decide to deviate from the standard “buy your stuff and leave” mode of thinking and stray into one that borders on the insane.  I’ll end up doing things out of the ordinary just to see how ordinary people react.  Interestingly enough, the reactions are more often inordinary than they are ordinary, which ordinarily makes me laugh a little inside.  But why be selfish?  I’ve decided to share my stories of social experimentation with readers, recording instances when they happen instead of just forgetting about them a week later.  Who knows?  Maybe you’ll get a kick out of them too.

Today’s experiment takes places at the Great Canadian Superstore.  For you Americans who don’t know what that is, think Wal-Mart Superstore.  Then think bigger.  Yeah, it’s huge.  Anyway, my shopping list consists of three bags* of 2% milk, a 2L carton of lactose-free milk, havarti cheese, and some Cracker Barrel cheese slices.  I will do my best to give an accurate representation of the entire half hour this took place in as it unfolded.

I enter the store through the east entrance, walk directly to the back of the store, and pick out just two bags of milk.  I then immediately turn around and walk to the self-checkout aisles further towards the west end of the store.  The girl attending takes a mild interest in me, possibly because of my stunningly good looks, or possibly because I’m purchasing eight litres of milk.  Regardless, I scan them through, put them in bags, pull a $20 out of my sweater pocket, pay, get my change, grab my bags, smile at the attendant, and walk back down towards the east entrance of the store.  I drop the two bags off in the trunk of my car and return for round two.

This time I enter again through the east entrance, though I am now consciously aware of my facial expression.  I am also consciously aware of the uncomfortable look I am forcing myself to wear, the kind of face that signals “I feel sick.”  With that, I return to the back of the store, pick up the third bag of milk, as well as the 2L carton of lactose-free milk.  I wander aimlessly for a few minutes before returning to the self-checkout aisles at the west end of the store.  Again, the attendant takes note of my presence, but this time looks over a little more often, possibly because I look even sexier when I look sick, or possibly out of concern for my health, or just maybe confused as hell.  I make sure that the side of the carton that says “Lactose-Free” is in clear view for her to see.  Once again, I scan, bag, pay for, and grab the goods and leave, this time with a slight sense of urgency.  I cast her a fleeting glance as I pass.  The look, which I can only describe as “what the fuck is going on here?” makes me smile as soon as she can no longer see my face.  Again, I return to the east entrance, put the milk in my car, and return for the third and final time.

Again, through the east entrance, but this time with a slight limp and an expression of deep concern on my face.  I travel as fast as my limp can carry me to the processed cheese, grabbing my beloved Cracker Barrel slices, before heading over to the delicatessan for the havarti.  A number of infuriating minutes later, I find the havarti and return, once again, to the self-checkout aisles at the west end of the store.  This time there’s a line up, so I stand inbetween the two sections, waiting for someone to finish.  I try my best to look impatient because the attendant, once again, is glancing worriedly in my direction.  At the first sign of another customer leaving, I limp in at top speed, furiously scanning the cheese and throwing them in a bag as quickly and haphazardly as possible.  I fumble around for some more change and feed it to the machine, making exact change.  I rip the receipt out of the machine and cram it into the bag as I yank it off of the counter, turning and again limping as quickly as I can past the attendant, this time without acknowledging her.  Turning my head slightly after I passed to see the reaction, I see her standing at her counter, debating whether or not to follow me, then calling to a supervisor.  Time to go.

Did I mention the cute looking girl I passed on the way to the aisle on the first trip?  No?  There was a cute looking girl I passed on the way to the aisle on the first trip.  She looked at me the first time, for a few seconds trying to figure out why I was carrying two bags of milk around, then making eye contact and looking away embarrassed.  This is the same girl I see in front of me at this point, aiming to leave the store through the east entrance.  I limp by quickly, bag of cheese in one hand, Blackberry in the other, look of deep concern still on my face, bumping into her.  I apologize quickly and continue limping off in a flustered hurry.  I vaguely hear her inquire “what the hell?” to her mom, walking beside her.  My work here is complete.  I threw the last of my bags into the trunk of my car and drove off.  As an added bonus, driving out of the parking lot she crossed in front of my car.  As she looked over, she made eye contact once more, and as it dawned on her who she was looking at, my eyes widened in terror and I sped off towards the exit as soon as she was out of the way.  I’m not sure what the reaction to that was, but I’m sure it was awesome.

-Mike

I apologize for the late post.  Unfortunately this weekend was hectic and involved me coming perilously close to losing various extremities.  Let’s delve into that for this post, shall we?

When one thinks “retail sales associate,” most people would assume that it involves little more than selling a borderline useless product at an insane margin to people who don’t need it with consummate skill.  Indeed, this is most often the case, and I’d say that maybe 90% of a sales associate’s time is spent doing exactly that.  The other 10% is spent rearranging product, working under the theory that if a given product moves around every couple of weeks it will sell better (if there are merchandisers in that store, the extra 10% is instead spent moping around in a constant state of depression caused by considering the other 90%).

My particular store doesn’t have merchandisers, so I fall into the first group of associates who spent the extra 10% rearranging product.  Except that I work for Intertan.  For those of you who are unaware, Intertan used to be the Tandy Corporation’s (read: RadioShack) international (read: Canadian) arm, which operated the retail store in the Great White North.  When that got bought out by Circuit City, RadioShack in Canada became The Source, products shifted from small electronics (transistors) to consumer electronics (digital cameras), and any shred of a vision for the company’s was immediately quelled.  In short, dickery ensued.

What does that have to do with what I was talking about earlier?  Surprisingly, a lot.  With the vast amount of funds available at their disposal, Intertan went about hiring people to fill upper management positions with astonishing vigor, including merchandising and marketing divisions that make up for their lack of numbers with a lack of competence.  Unfortunately, nobody was aware that in the real world, instead of making a positive, two negatives make a big fucking mess.  As I said before, the main operating principle of the (and I expect anyone who has ever worked retail to cringe at the following term) “plan-o-gram” is that, if you move shit around enough, people will buy more of it, maybe because they’ve forgotten that they already bought it in a different section of the store; those of you with short term memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease may want to start considering a class-action lawsuit right about now).

For most organizations, this involves changing stack outs to display promotions that may be going on at the time, or making certain products more accessible, or fixing problems with an existing setup that someone else’s incompetence created to begin with.  Thanks to Intertan’s merchandising and marketing divisions, the scope of their plan-o-grams often include things such as rearranging entire sections and making no fucking sense.  Imagine for a second that you walk into Best Buy every few weeks to browse around, maybe pick up recordable media or grab some music CDs.  Then one day you walk in and the recordable media has been moved to the home appliances section.  Once you find them and go to peruse the music section, you find that an iPod display has taken the place of the Country genre in its entirety, which is now soundly stored away inside a washer/dryer combo that was inexplicably relocated to the car audio section.  What the fuck, right?

Okay, it is a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.  The last major setup consisted of rearranging approximately 50ft of shelf space making up the computer section.  This involved several extra hours of work, inhaling cancer, and physically moving approximately 50ft of shelf space.  This doesn’t include the minor setups that we get about three times a month.  Or the extra time they have to pay employees for to do the setups, instead of using the money to.. oh, I don’t know.. lower the insane prices of the products they carry.

But what do I know, I’m just a retail sales associate.

-Mike

And they want more posts.  At least 6 of you do.  I accidentally marked one vote as spam (sorry Dic) and one other was too lazy to actually post, but 6 people actually read my blog enough to want more updates, so starting from today I’m going to do my very best to post regular updates at least once a week.  These will come on Sunday nights/Monday mornings so that everyone will have something to read to start their weeks off with.  As I said before, these will come in the form of either senseless ramblings or witty comic shorts, but gods willing, something will be here on Monday mornings.

That being said, I suppose I should leave everyone with something more than an update, so.. behold:

Witty comic shorts.

-Mike

P.S. I promise future comics will be of higher artistic calibre.

If you check this blog fairly often and want more regular posts, give me a comment or two.  Based on the response, I may start updating more frequently, even if I have nothing to blog about.

Hell, maybe I’ll even start a pseudo-web-comic, a la xkcd’s short and dirty style of drawing, and quick and witty style of writing.  Vote for that too.

Show me the love!

I use my car a lot.  When I’m not using it to get to work, I use it to get to my dad’s house, or my mom’s house, or a friend’s house, or a whore house, etc.  As a result, I deal with a good number of other drivers in my travels.  Unfortunately, I often end up driving for (or around) a lot of them because of their complete inability to operate a motor vehicle.  After a while, it gets tiresome; people don’t use common sense, and for the most part seem to forget that there are other people on the road that have to deal with their incompetence.

Now, of course there are books and guides that tell people how they should be driving, but I think the main problem with a lot of these books are just that: they’re books.  People don’t like to read, or they’re too lazy to do so, and so they don’t really have any idea whatsoever of what they’re doing when they get into an automobile.  I believe I have a solution to that problem.  What if there was a short article, that one could read in a meager five minutes?  Wouldn’t a lot more people read that?  Yes, they probably would.  So here, for the first time ever, is a short 5 step guide to help you not drive like a complete wanker.

Step 1: Wake up ten minutes earlier.  While this seemingly arduous task robs you of a minimum ten minutes of sleep, it gives you ten more minutes to accomplish things before you leave for the day.  Quite often, these are things that, if done while operating a motor vehicle, can take up quite a bit of your attention span, which is better used for more important things, such as operating a motor vehicle.  Here is a short list of tasks that you can complete in your extra ten minutes:

• eat
• drink (non-alcoholic)
• read a newspaper
• shave/apply makeup
• do hair
• masturbate
• clean ears with Q-tip®
• clip toenails
• and more!

Doing any of these before you leave for your destination will greatly improve the amount of attention that you can give to the road as well as other drivers.  Your fellow road-users will thank you for taking those ten minutes out of your sleep routine!

Step 2: Save your phone calls for later.  Few things are important enough to warrant a twenty minute conversation on a cellular device, and none are important enough to warrant taking up the left lane of the highway while you discuss your new pair(s) of shoes with whoever is on the other end of the line.

Step 3: Don’t take up the left lane of the highway while you discuss your new pair(s) of shoes with anybody.  In fact, don’t take up the left lane of the highway.  If you don’t know what it’s for, don’t use it.  First hint is that it’s not for cruising in.  Second hint is that it’s for passing in.  If you’re not passing anybody, or if somebody wants to pass you, move to the right.  Also note that the lane directly to the right of the leftmost lane is the passing lane for trucks.  That means that if there’s a truck coming, it’s probably best to get the fuck out of the way.

Step 4: When attempting to get the fuck out of the way of anything, or making any change in direction such as changing lanes, turning, or slamming into a guardrail, signal your intentions.  By this, I mean signal them well ahead of time.  Turning your right turn signal on while you’re already in the process of turning your steering wheel to the right doesn’t help anybody out; we can already see that you’re turning.  This is roughly the equivelant of a large man punching you square in the face, uttering “I’m going to punch you in the face now” somewhere in the middle of his extension.  Note that he has already punched you in the face by the time his sentence has finished.  Keep that in mind the next time you start turning without a signal on.

Step 5: Pay attention.  Between paying for gas, paying insurance, paying bills, paying child support, and paying a weekly visit to the psychologist for that unfortunate late night rendezvous with the friendly neighbourhood registered sex offender a few months back, I can understand that paying attention is mostly just another burden to bear, but listen up.  This is the final and most important step of this article.  Whether it be to the idiot in front of you who’s going to start turning without his signal, the guy behind you trying to get by while you’re taking up the left lane for no reason, or the truck that’s decided to move over without making sure no cars (read: you) are in his way, you must pay attention to everything.  Yes, even that accident at the side of the road.  No, don’t slow down to thirty to get a closer look, just take note of it and consider that lack of attention to other people on the road probably caused it.  Also pay attention the guy in front of you.  He’s about to slow down to thirty for a closer look.

Apple and I have always had a strange relationship. For the most part, it has been less than warm. So, when he new iPhone was released on July 11th, I was surprised that some of the features were actually sort of impressive. Aside from the phone basically being an iPod Touch with an antenna and a speaker in it and still having the screen turn into a smudgy piece of shit whenever you tried to use it, it had a strange sort of appeal to it. Possibly the same kind of appeal as, say, skydiving. “Holy shit, this is totally fucking retarded. But maybe..”

I wanted to give it a bit of a run around, see what’s what about all of this Apple hype. Of course I wasn’t about to go and drop $200 as well as an activation fee and a data plan in order to try it out for a few days, so the only other option available to me was to try out the iPhone’s older brother, the Touch. In fact, with the help of the WordPress app from Apple’s “App Store” (ha, I see what you did there), this whole blog is being written out on this little gadget. But let’s get to the important bits, shall we?

The Touch with the 2.0 software on it feels a lot like using the iPhone to begin with, albeit smaller and without some of the more important phone features. The interface is intuitive and the famed accelerometer adds a lot of functionality to the device. The wi-fi is easy to use, automatically distinguishing between WEP and WPA encryption, and holds a signal fairly well to boot. There are some neat settings such as auto-brightness, locking options, and location services, as well as the ability to leave this app and go check the settings again without losing everything I had just typed.

It’s main focus, the music player, is actually surprisingly well done. The library is easy to navigate by playlist, artist, or song name, although artists are case sensitive, resulting in From Autumn To Ashes preceding From Autumn to Ashes on the list. A minor annoyance. The sound quality is vastly improved from my last experience with an iPod, the 2nd generation iPod Paperweight.

At this point, then, you might be thinking “wow! It’s brilliant!” It’s not, and I’ll tell you why. The music player is limited in its options, and to even access them, you must back out of the player and go through a couple of pages of settings where you are greeted by an underwhelming selection of options. There is no x-band equalizer, there is no SRS setting, there is no individual bass and treble boost, and most of the preset EQs sound like the rest of the preset EQs. So the music player is useless.

Wi-fi works great - when you can find a wireless network to use. Most of the time these are found in places where you might end up with a laptop anyway, and considering Safari mobile and most of the other wi-fi applications fall short of useful to begin with, it stands to reason that you’d likely be better off with the laptop in any case. So the wi-fi is useless.

Typing this entire entry put with the Touch’s “keypad” has been nothing shy of agony. The lack of tactile response compounded by the difficulty of hitting the chiclet sized keys has resulted in numerous errors that even Apple’s software doesn’t know what to make of. This sentence will be types entiwlu eithot the manual aidvfo going back and changing errors. Yeah. Eithot. So the keyboard is useless.

iTunes is the reason I drink. Everything needs to be verified, authorized, registered, synced and otherwise controlled via iTunes. The best explanation I can come up with for this is that Apple, even after charging their customers exorbitant amounts of money for their mediocre products, enjoys making those same customers feel like they stole the product. And it doesn’t even work that well. So iTunes is useless.

That all being said, I’m formatting the iPod in a few minutes so that I can return it to the guy who was nice enough to let me borrow it for half a week, which is around the top end of how long I can deal with Apple’s unique brand of bullshit. I honestly thought that maybe the iPhone’s sibling could change my outlook on the company, but evidently this is not the case. It has only reaffirmed my original opinion that Apple can’t actually get anything done right.

And fuck this screen. Seriously.

- Mike

I want to write something about the announcement of Diablo III.  Obviously this is a huge announcement for any fan of the Diablo franchise, as the release of new content in the series has become relatively stagnant.  I blame the wild success of WarCraft III and the subsequent MMORPG of the same World for holding back production of Blizzard’s other two franchises, the other of course being StarCraft.  The problem with wanting to write something, however, is that I don’t know where to begin.  Unfortunately, a lot of material has already been covered among unofficial fan sites and their respective forums (the latter being largely populated by estrogen driven boys who have only recently been introduced to the scenes of Diablo, social acceptance, and puberty), so most anything I have to say will likely be verbatim with some obscure post on some message board somewhere already.  Though I do have an issue to address, and that is the resemblance to World of Warcraft that people are drawing from the gameplay videos.

There is now a skill bar.  The experience bar takes up a large part of the GUI.  The graphics and animation look childish.  These are but a few of the complaints I’ve already seen floating around.  I’ll begin by saying that the skill bar is an improvement on a scale of orders of magnitude over what was previously implemented in the Diablo games.  Instead of having to select a different skill and then click whichever mouse button you have assigned that skill to be assigned to (this is the easiest way I can describe it - seriously), you have all of your major skills at the touch of a few buttons.  Just like every other RPG ever made, ever. It makes sense that Blizzard would take this approach with the newest addition to the Diablo family.

The experience bar has always been fairly prominent in the Diablo games.  I’m not sure what it’s like in WoW as I have never bothered wasting my time with that fetid cesspool of a game, but I can’t imagine it being very far off from, again, every other RPG ever made, ever. People like seeing the progress of their character.  To make it prominent, again, makes sense.  I wish there was a bigger bar in my mind that showed me more clearly what the big fucking deal is about this.

It’s childish.  Really?  It’s childish?  I’m not sure which gameplay trailer a lot of these kids saw, but I saw the one where a gigantic hellspawned creature picked up a Barbarian and bit its head off before throwing the decapitated corpse across the ground.  Let me rephrase this.  A demon of the netherworld the size of a small truck with teeth, claws and spikes the size of broom handles bodily picked up a Barbarian with one arm, ate its head, and casually tossed a bloody, limp corpse with a stubby neck, gushing blood like a fire hydrant, across a square.  If this is considered to be childish, then I believe I have a reason to be concerned about the sort of material children are being exposed to.

That being addressed, I must say that I am intrigued by the new style of combat the gameplay trailer suggests.  No longer is it a brute force thing where if you are powerful enough, you can just stroll up to a boss and have at until it dies.  The trailer implies that this form of combat typically ends in dental decapitation, and presumably worse.  I for one am glad that they’re creating a more immersive game in Diablo III in contrast to the bland yet mindlessly enjoyable point-and-click interface of the past iterations.  The worst case scenario is that this play style actually draws in players with some form of intelligence beyond that of the majority of current players, whose articulation largely falls somewhere between uncontrollable mouse-hand seizures and top-of-the-lungs shouting at the computer screen.

-Mike

It stands to reason that something awesome should be awesome from beginning to end.  To do otherwise would be a falsification of the term, i.e. how can something possibly be awesome if there are parts of it that are simply not awesome?  Take a car for example.  Think of the most amazing looking car you can throw together in your mind’s eye.  It has leather bucket seats with 6 way adjustalibity and seat warmers, fully adjustable steering wheel, a clear and easy to read gauge cluster, stunning visibility all around, properly positioned mirrors, the shifter and emergency brake in easy reach, an ample amount of storage in the form of glove box and centre console, a marvelous sounding audio system, and to throw that extra cherry on the top, satellite navigation.  On top of all the interior features, it sports a modestly sized V8 engine that is pleasantly and surprisingly economical while still producing a fair amount of power, and the frame is solid with a perfectly tuned suspension that is tight enough to handle superbly, yet soft enough to offer a smooth ride on almost any terrain.  Now, if you think this all sounds awesome, you would be right.  But this car is not awesome.

“But Mike,” you now ask, “how could that not be awesome?”  It is not awesome, dear reader, because I did not mention that it has air conditioning, or indeed any form of climate control whatsoever.  Because it doesn’t.  This makes this otherwise awesome car decidedly not awesome.  “What kind of car like that would come without climate control?” you now wonder. You’ve missed the point.  Anything is only as good as the worst part about it.  “Well then, what IS your point?  Why go through all the trouble of trying to get this all across?”

Cheese is not awesome.

I came to this startling realization while following some obscure train of thought, other details of which are not important to this matter.  In case you missed it the first time, or in case your brain actively prevented you from reading and comprehending the phrase in order to protect your sanity, I say again, cheese is not awesome.  And this is why:

1. Good cheese is awesome in every aspect except for preparation.  Unfortunately, many good cheeses come in a number of satanical contraptions such as “wheels,” “wedges,” and “bricks.”  From a personal account, believe me when I tell you that cheese is difficult to eat in its raw form, and for the most part, must be refined, usually with a knife.  The amount of effort that must be put in to removing a respectable amount of cheese in manageable portions is totally absurd.  Whatever raw form you obtain this delicious dairy delicacy in, great lengths must be taken to properly portion it out.  This is not awesome.
2. Fortunately, someone, somewhere had this same thought and came up with the idea of processed cheese.  On the outset, this seems like a fantastic idea; you purchase cheese from the supermarket and are awarded with the ease of simply removing generous pre-sized portions of cheese from their individual wrappers, a testament to the ability of a terminally lazy mind to facilitate its own laziness.  Unfortunately, this kind of cheese more often than not tastes like a stick of butter left to sit in a tub of curdled milk for several days.  This is not awesome.
3. Speaking of curdled milk, cheese goes bad as well.  Sometimes astoundingly quickly.  If you are incapable of consuming cheese in one of the larger aforementioned hellical devices, a horrible green plague will begin to consume it in your place.  What’s worse is that this abomination can make you seriously ill if you simply attempt to ignore it, not to mention that its taste is worse than that of processed cheese, a rare feat indeed.  It can be bypassed, of course, but this again involves the use of a knife and an even greater deal of effort on your part.  This is not awesome

I can therefore only be lead to the conclusion that, again, cheese is not awesome.  I am sorry for those whose lives I have just ruined, paradigms shattered by a horrid realization that I have just shared with you.  My sincerest apologies go out to you.  With that, though, I must take my leave.

-Mike
P.S. I’m just fucking around.  Cheese is fucking awesome.

P.P.S. When I mentioned that my blog had magically fixed itself, I apparently lied.  I found out later that it was the doing of the one and only Nimby, the same guy who set me up with all the tools that I needed to start this, as well as some space on his own server for the website.  Mad props to Nimby, thanks!

A few days following my last entry almost a month ago, WordPress decided it was going to freak the fuck out and paste “holyshityoubrokeit” code all across the top portion of my page.  Something was very wrong.  I could not log in to check out what was going on either, as WordPress decided that this freak out was more important than, say, verifying a password and letting me fix it.  Twenty-four days later, it has fixed itself.  Seriously.  I didn’t do anything to it.  It just.. works now.  But I digress.

Not having a blog has actually frustrated me as there have been times where I just need to write about some person or event’s blatant stupidity.  This is new because previously I would have just said “well, that’s really stupid” and been done with it.  However, in the short time I had this outlet, I got used to sharing my thoughts with the internet, and so when I lost that ability, it became progressively more difficult to not tell people that they should succumb to Darwin and remove themselves from the gene pool.

A middle-aged woman, presumably eastern European from her accent, came into my store yesterday inquiring if she could pay her Source card bill at our store.  “No, you can’t pay the bills off here,” I said politely.  This happens from time to time, but usually after the first denial, people smarten up.  Not this one.  Bless her poor heart for having to put up with her brain, she paused and asked “why not?”  “This is not a bank, ma’am.  This is a retail store.  I cannot help you here.”  At this point she seemed thoroughly confused.  “Where can I pay it off then?” she asked.  “The bank,” I offered.  I watched intently as the words seemed to permeate her skull, wander around for a bit in search of something that could deal with them, promptly give up, and depart.  “Full stop!” I could nearly hear the helmsman of her mind call out.  This proposition had brought the whole thought process to a grinding halt.  Pay bills at a bank?  Blasphemy!  Thankfully she nodded and left with her son at this point.  Had she continued, I would have had to tell her that I was utterly and entirely physically incapable of helping her pay her bill at my retail store.

I read earlier in the week a news story about a man who tried to pay for gas in some obscure American state or another.  This on it’s own is normal, but this man decided to surpass the boundaries of asinine and pay for his ten dollars in gas entirely in pennies.  The store clerk rightfully refused to accept this as a method of payment.  Good for him.  I was then shocked to find people DEFENDING this man in the comments following the story.  Comments such as “it’s legal tender,” “way to protest the gas prices,” and my favourite (not a direct quote, paraphrased), “I would have waited for him to pay.  People don’t slow down enough to enjoy the best things in life.”

I will address these in reverse order.  First, anybody who considers waiting in a line-up during morning rush hour to pay your $70 in gas while some clown decides he wants some gas station attendant to count his thousand pennies one of the “best things in life” probably has to have the most miserable lifestyle this side of Somalia.  Paying for gas is probably not their foremost concern.  They should really be focusing their attention more on dinner from, say, the dumpster behind Swiss Chalet.  Second, gas prices are not protested at the pumps, nor are they protested at the attendant.  Making a gas station attendant, who has presumably barely passed high school to begin with, count coins for gas is not only cruel, but pointless.  Everybody’s time is wasted, and the gas company gets the money anyways.  Where is the protest?  I can’t find it.  Third, coins are actually not legal tender.  I’m serious.  Take a penny out of your pocket and look for “legal tender” on it anywhere.  If you still don’t believe me, look it up.  Regardless, there is no law that says the merchant of a product or service must take money that a consumer offers them.  In fact, there is a law that states the exact opposite, and it is fully within a merchant’s right to refuse payment for a product or service for any reason.  On top of this, I’m not sure if the States has a similar law, but up here in Soviet Canuckistan, there are laws that outline the maximum amount of money you can pay in a given denomination.  25c in pennies, $5 in nickels, and so on.  This means that if somebody tried to pay for something at my store in 1000 pennies, not only could I legally refuse him, but I should also legally be allowed to plant a hammer in his face.

I think that’s enough stupidity for one day though.

-Mike