I find shopping for office supplies to be a dreary, life-force draining experience. Going into Staples or Office Depot is almost as bad as getting dragged into a arts and crafts store and being forced to browse through fifty rolls of infinitesimally dissimilar white rolls of yarn. Kill me now. Please. In office supply stores I find some entertainment looking at the computer mice and keyboards and monitors, but that lasts about twelve seconds and then I feel hungover and I start drooling and lying around on the tile floor.

I remember once as a kid my parents took me along when they went carpet shopping, no doubt for some inch thick burnt orange pile. It was the seventies after all. I was so bored I remember lying on my back on one of the giant rolls of shag. I was lying perpendicular to the roll, so my back was arched backwards with the curve of the carpet. I lay there as if I had been injected with a potent parallitic (which, in a way I had). I remember faded yellow tiles in the roof and fluorescent lights buzzing because I stared at the celling for so long. Good thing this wasn’t outside or I would have burnt my eyes out staring into the sun. I was so bored I couldn’t move. I didn’t have the energy to even follow my mom around and whine. I’ve spent many years in therapy dealing with this childhood trauma. I’m in a carpet shopping victim’s support group.

This is how I feel when I go office supply shopping. I pause at the door. I take a deep breath. I get myself psyched up. I’m like Michael Phelps getting in the zone with his iPod and rap music before he lines up on the platform and flaps his arms three times. I need performance enhancing drugs to get in and out with my life.

So today I went to Staples. I could have gone to Office Depot, which is a bit closer to my home. But until today I found Staples to be a bit more survivable for some indefinable reason I can’t really enumerate. I needed to buy manilla folders, laser printer paper, and a Brother labeler (one of those little gizmos that look like a big calculator that print labels on tape).

The reason I needed this stuff is I am now worshipping at the altar of David Allen’s Getting Things Done. This weekend I’m working on my physical filing system. I already have a Dymo label printer, and I labelled a dozen or so folders last night, but I really found the Dymo experience to be quite fundemetally sucktastic. So I’m going with David Allen’s suggestion of a labeler. But I wondering from my story. I’m planning on posting more about my experience with GTD later.

Once in Staples, I found my folders and printer paper fine. No problem. Then I found the labelers. They had a few but the one I wanted only had a (non-functional) display model. No boxes of this specific merchandise anywhere. I needed to look at the box. I wanted to make sure it had two features, an AC adaptor and an automatic cutter. I wandered around a bit looking for one of the red shirted staff members. When I asked him for help he said he needed to find someone else to help me because his shift was up. Um, ok. I’ll wait over in the next isle for this other person. Five minutes later that same dude came over and said he couldn’t find the other guy to help me. Of course, he probably could have helped me by then and I had to bite back a snarky comment.

I asked about the labeler I was interested in. Are you out of stock? Can I look at the box? His reply was that this was a high priced item and they don’t put it on the floor. Did I want to buy it? Why did I just want to look at it? I said I wanted to check a few things on the box before possibly buying it. He disappeared. Five minutes later, another guy comes by. Presumably the dude that was missing in action earlier. We go through the same rigamarole. Almost word for word. At this point I have around fifteen minutes invested in trying to look at the box. He disappears.

After a few minutes I look at my watch. They have five minutes or I’m walking. In about four minutes, yet another employee shows up. I explain again. Same script. Different minute. She at least goes and gets it. She finds me a few minutes later lying on the tile floor and drooling after I attempted to entertain myself looking at Logitech mice. Fail.

She hands me the box which is wrapped in high security cable evidently whose purpose is to securely attach some soft of blinking and beeping anti theft GPS device the size of my head. Whatever. I start reading the box. Looking at what’s included. The features. You know. Shopping. That kind of thing.

She is standing about a foot away watching me closely – as if I’m fondling The Golden Jubilee diamond and I might swallow it at any moment. She asks me if I have any questions about the labeler. I look at her, and think I’m pretty sure you don’t know more about the labeler than what it says right here on the box. This is what I think, but NOT what I say, which is a bit more polite.

Then I wander back to the labeler section (remember I’m standing in my drool puddle in front of the keyboards and mice) because I want to look at the labeler tape, since what comes with it is the “starter pack”. I want to supplement my supplies and future proof my future tape deficit scenarios. She’s right behind me. I slowly stop at my destination afraid if I stop suddenly she’ll run right into me. She stands there watching me, arms across her chest.

Finally I say, “Do you mind if I look at this without you hovering over me?” I’m afraid my tone was probably less than perky and pleased.

She gives me a look like “no way, you’ll stick it under your shirt and boogie right out the door”. Seriously, the look was so filled with distrust and unease I blurted out “I’m NOT going to steal it for God’s sake”. Other customers stop in mid shop and look over. She gave me another look, like I was ten years old, caught with my hand in the gummy bear bulk bin, and she turned on her heel and sped away, no doubt planning to monitor me from afar with infrared binoculars and one of those handheld audio listening devices with the big microphone and satellite dishes attached to a pistol grip.

I then choose my labeler tape, went up to the front, and bought my stuff. This all told took at least twenty minutes longer than it should have and sucked two days of life force right out of me. I probably could, or should, have walked out and gone to Office Depot, but that would have probably cost me more time, and who knows what evil hazing I might have to undergo there. So I just got the hell out with my stuff.

Ask me if I’m going back to Staples. Go ahead ask me.

Let’s talk about this asinine policy for a second. First, this labeler was $99.00 (but it currently has a $50 rebate). Is this really a high priced item? Really? I pointed out several items in boxes next to the labeler display. A $120.00 shredder. A $100.00 wireless phone setup. Why are these in boxes on the shelves? “See, they’re more expensive than the labeler,” I say. I point to the price tags and look quizzically at the Staples corporate representative.

“Well, sir, that’s the policy,” says the glassy eyed, worn out, fed up employee. I could almost hear his unkind thoughts smashing around in his cerebral cortex. Of course I know this isn’t his fault. He’s just trying to get his paycheck and get home to watch America’s got talent because his Uncle Billy Joe Bob is auditioning with his goldfish jugging and yodeling act. He’s got places to be.

I’m so sick of hearing that such and so is the ‘policy’. It’s dehumanizing, and well, just tiring.

I think this ‘policy’ was the brilliant idea of some middle management corporate suit who was trying to prove to his boss that he’s thinking outside the box. He’s trying to show that he’s thinking about saving the company money. Money lost on shoplifting. He’s trying to get that two dollar an hour pay raise. I imagine him sitting in a windowless conference room, at a faded and cracked plastic table, in a folding chair with one short leg, drinking day old Dunkin Donut coffee, nauseous and headachy after a late night of over indulging on of AppleBeeTinis. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. But here’s the rub – he’s less concerned about Staples’ customers and more worried about corporate politics. It’s all for show man – it’s all for show.

One last question – does Staples really have problems with gangs of shoplifters absconding with Brother labelers? Is there a black market for these? Do drug dealers label their plastic bins full of their wares with ‘crack’, ‘black tar heroin’, or ‘Amy Winehouse’s pallet of hash’? Does this inconvenience for the customer really outweigh the savings gained by preventing all these labelers from hitting the street? Does repeat business factor into this policy?

I think we know the answer, don’t we. The answer is Staples FAIL.

This bugs the ever loving snot out of me. Go type in a domain without the suffix into the IE address bar. Example: “Amazon”. This fails with the a “website can’t be found error” because “http://amazon/” isn’t a valid address. Well, duh, you piece of stinky guano. Why not add the dot com automatically? Like Safari does? We. Have. The. Technology. What IE wants you to do here is type the name and then hit control-enter. This fills out the www and dot com and this works. But god help you if you hit control-enter and you already have the domain suffix or www prefix entered. You’re like to get “http://www.amazon.com.com” or “http://www.www.foo.net.com”. For phuck sake what decendant of Albert Einstein thought up this feature? Mr or Mrs Wedumb? I think so.

Note that in order for you get sucked into this feature poop pit, you have to turn off searching from the address bar in the advanced preferences (don’t get me started on scrolling lists of checkboxes and radio buttons). Hate the searching. Never gets it right and it destroys whatever I’ve typed in. Ninety percent of the time it’s a typo and it goes to the wrong site or gives me an error, but either way it destroys what I’ve typed in the address bar. Which makes me want to snap someone’s neck like one of those long matches I light my barbecue with. Ok, maybe that’s a bit on the violent side, but come on. Who designed this? Mr or Mrs Weannoyu? I think so.

Safari does this right. If you type in “amazon” – it’s going to add www and dot com. And it’s not going to add it twice. And if either the prefix or the suffix is there already, it’s not going to flap it arms and run around the room screaming like a monkey shot with a pellet gun. Yes, IE 6 sometimes acts like a monkey.

Sigh. These things bother me.

So I happened to randomly turn on the TV and there’s this show on about bow hunting (no, not wolverine hunting). I’m sitting here watching for a few minutes and they’re talking about drawing from the sitting position and tracking an animal across the hunters field of vision. Pff. Animal. A bit euphimistic. They mean beautiful elk or white tailed dear. The hunters have all this specialized gear: camouflaged pants, jacket, hat, and even face covering. The bows are compound bows with all kinds of pulleys and laser sights and clip on quivers. Pretty cool gear, but it’s all to kill a fantastic animal who happens to wonder in front of their virtually invisible blinds. The poor animal just wants to eat a few leaves and instead it gets a carbon fiber arrow in its eyeball. Ow.

Also, I should say I’ve been hunting myself. This is also how I know it’s not for me. I’ve killed a few pheasants, geese, and ducks in my day. As a kid. At least when you’re fishing you can throw the fish back.

Sigh, I’m really not a whacked out left-wing liberal. I just don’t get where the fun in killing animals comes from. It’s a bit creepy.

Actually, there IS one situation I might want to shoot an animal actually. When I’m shooting with my Nikon. Hah! Nah, I didn’t think that joke was funny either. Sigh.

Also everyone on this show is a southern white guy with stringy facial hair and a mullet. Ok, I added the mullet. I don’t believe in stereotyping people. But, jeez, make it a little harder would ya? Maybe if you had Oprah out there taking down a polar bear with a lasso and an icepick, I’d be a little more open minded about it all. I don’t think cultural diversity is a high priority here. Gah. Now I’m just being silly.

This post is a warning sign on the virtual highway of computing life. It’s for those attempting to stay in the fast lane while driving a creaky and leaky Windows XP. I think I just got passed by a lime green 1973 pinto, and the old lady driving it gave me the finger.

Anyway, I came very close to shoving a sharpened pencil in my eye tonight. Just to take my mind off the pain.

Here’s why:

Did you know that if you hold down the shift key when you click on a folder, while you’re in the “explore” view, and you’re viewing that folder’s contents as thumbnails, that the Windows explorer will NOT show the file and folder names under the thumbnail? The shift key actually toggles viewing the file names on and off. Gah. Sputter. Cough. Choke.

Did your further know that if you hold down the shift key and double click on a folder, while NOT in the “explore” view, that the Windows explorer will open a new window into a “explore” view, showing the contents of that folder? Gah. Sputter. Cough. Choke.

If you’re like me, experiencing this results in the public broadcasting of an embarrassingly large quantity of loosely related short nasty words, the throwing of small meowing kittens, and a spree of Teddy bear strangling.

Woa unto those who don’t know about the thumbnail view shift key toggle, um, eff-up, because this the type of thing the sends people to rubber rooms, drooling on themselves, mumbling about conspiracies, and giggling inappropriately at people getting hit in the crotch during dodgeball.

All I knew was that my file and folder names disappeared for no reason that I could possibly reconcile with my tenuous grasp on reality. I searched options boxes, menu items, and various other nooks and crannies. There’s even a obvious “choose details” dialog box. Seems like a likely place for this sort of thing. Hey, the first item is “Name”. Aha! Wait, it’s checked, and keep waiting, because I can’t click on it or change it, yet my file names and folders are still not visible!

AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!
Meeeeeeoooooooooow…… thump.
Meeeeeeoooooooooow…… thump.

Holy fracking sheepdip! I must have a virus or spyware, or my disk is corrupted! Maybe I’ll have to repave my machine. Mike makes a sudden embarrassing, involuntary, and quite rude sound and then bolts from the room, only to return a few minutes later with a nice pair of freshly laundered big boy pants.

Also try this. Go to a folder with lots of folders in it. Open it all nice and fresh and don’t do anything to it. Now hold down shift key and double click the last one. Ha ha, you just opened all the folders in the window into their own separate windows. See, if you want to double click a folder and have it open in its own window (and only open one window), you have to click on it first. Gah. Son of a Pilsbury Dough Boy! Meeeeeeoooooooooow…… thump! I swear I did this about twenty times in the last hour. Genius, pure genius.

And now, dammit, I’m out of kittens. And, frankly, the will to live.

I hate my laptop. No. Let me rephrase. I loathe and despise it.

So much so, I cuss out the little f*cker every day.

Do you know, laptop, what a piece of steaming poo you are? You don’t? Well, I’m here to say poo you are. Nay, not just poo, laptop, but steaming poo. Laptop. Yes, I’m talking to you. I rue the day we met. Further, laptop, I regret your very existence. Yes Laptop. You. Quit your crying, you little baby. Do you want go into the closet again? I thought not, laptop.

Close the laptop. Put it in your bag. Come back to it a few hours or a day later. An alert: “hibernation failed” [OK][Cancel]. Click OK. You get another alert. “Plug in power immediately! You’re battery is dead you dumb user!” Black screen. Reboot. Disk churn. Churn. Screen flashes. Crash.

Track pad. Extra features like scrolling on one side just cause flashing and beeping freakouts. Uninstalled driver leaves only the worst trackpad known to mankind. This is the one the engineer designed and said to his management “here’s the prototype, it doesn’t work for shit, but you get the idea.” Of course his managers were high fiving and shouting “Ship it!” at the top of their lungs. This is why I carry a mouse with me everywhere I bring Mr. Crashy McCrasher.

Wireless. Hah. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. Crash.

Crapware? Oh, we got it. Machine running too fast? Your applications too stable? Do you need to be interrupted with ui that looks like it was designed by Skippy the ninth grade AV club president? Then have no fear we have more Crapware than you can stake a bluetooth enabled stick at. And don’t worry, once it’s installed you can’t get rid of it (it’s a particularly nastly type of Venereal Disease for computers) and your machine is never as stable as it was, no matter if you uninstall or not. Do I really need the driver for drag and drop DVD writing (wtf does this even mean)? Or the software that goes “ping”? Or software that runs around like a little kid screaming look at me! look at me! I pooed my diaper! Pay attention! I don’t care if you’re writing an important email!

Yes, I’m talking about the Toshiba Tecra M2. Incidentally, looking around for a link to info about it, I saw only favorable reviews. Here’s the thing. Laptop reviewers? On crack. Yes. See they’re used to such craptacular laptops that this worthless hodgepodge of crappy parts and incompatable software passes for a good laptop. God that’s just pathetically sad. Try using a Mac Powerbook for ten minutes. Now that’s a great laptop. I’m talking hardware here folks. Also, does Apple install all of Skippy’s shareware projects and software experiments? No. Toshiba, Dell, Gateway, all you dumbasses should take a lesson from this. Apple strives for a unified and positive user experience, not a many bulleted list of “features” put together by marketing folks who think mass mailings and popup ads are a good idea. Oh, the humanity!

No more Toshibas for me. Ever. And that, my friend, is my solemn promise to you. To me. To Toshiba. To all you purveyors of Crapware infested pooboxes. Yes, and to you, laptop, you little poo-top. You little lap-poo.

Fujitsu makes good laptops. At least the ones I’ve seen. Nice hardware. A minimum of installed Crapware. Maybe one of the future Apple Intel based Powerbooks so I can run Vista on it.

OK, I’m done bitching now. I better go reboot my laptop again. It just crashed, drained its battery, and corrupted all magnetic media within a two mile radius. There’s a smoking crater on my desktop. Know what I did to cause this? I took it out of my bag, opened it, and plugged it into its dock.

It’s times like this I’m glad I don’t have any of the following in my office at work. Sledgehammer. Chainsaw. Acid blood from one of Ripley’s Aliens. A family of pissed off Orangutans hopped up on PCP. A scud missile. A two year old boy with a big gulp of Mountain Dew and fist full of pixie sticks. A grumpy camel.

Yes. A grumpy camel. God help you, laptop, if I had a grumpy camel. Yes, I’m talking to you. Quit your blubbering. I’ll give you something to blubber about. Come back here. Don’t run from me. You’re only making it worse. Don’t make me get out the Orangutans. Laptop, you sicken me.

Ok, this is starting to really piss me off. Here we have some random site hosting an image and they have the stones to put their logo or url or whatever on it even though it’s been making the rounds on the net for a while. This is NOT your picture, you greedy bastards.

Here’s a good example. I’ve seen the picture below many times on many sites (and it cracks me up) but here it is ruined by the fracking url. Thanks for ruining it. So there’s a site I’ll never go to again. Dorks.com? Come here, I have something to tell you. Smack. You suck.

Hey Microsoft, I have $400.00 to give you for an Xbox 360! Yay. What’s that you say? You have none to sell me? You don’t want my money? Ah, well, I guess I’ll spend it on Playstation II games.

Note: the “in stock” Xbox 360s are auctions where the prices are at least two to three time the retail price of around $400.00.

So today I was stopped briefly in traffic on the freeway on the way to work and the dude ahead of me sticks his hand out his window palm down with his fist wrapped around something crumpled. I’m all, don’t do it. DON’T! DO! IT! But then he straightens his fingers and the crumpled garbage floats to the ground and I’m screaming “nooooooo!” in slow motion, pounding on the steering wheel, and generally not taking the whole thing too well. I wanted to lay into my horn. But instead I did nothing but stew in my anger and wish for a laser guided missile strike.

This reminds me of quick story. Worst litter out the window story ever actually. It was me and Reeves driving back from a track event in Southern Ca. on I-5. I’m pulling a car trailer with my Corvette in it and he’s following me in his Corvette. I blow a tire on the trailer and pull over onto a wide expanse of weeds on the side of the road. Reeves pulls outside of me on the grass and hops out. We begin the process of taking the wheel off the trailer. Then we’re like, “holy mother of god, what is that smell!?” Turns out Reeves had run over a diaper that some upstanding citizen had tossed out a car window. On the freeway. A full to the brim diaper that had exploded inside his wheel-well when he drove over it. This had us both gagging and retching and saying unchristian things, but it was worse for Reeves since he had to drive the car to the next stop and then hose it out. Gah.

Holy crap, (no pun intended) why throw your litter our your window? Worse, why throw your childs poo out your window? Explain this to me. How hard is it to put your trash in a trash can the next time you stop? Chances are there’s a trash can within a few feet, where ever that might be. Think about. Rest stops. Gas stations. Starbucks. Fast food. Malls. Even stores that sell trash cans have trash cans out front.

I say bring back the stockade. If you’re caught littering we all get to pelt you with whatever you tossed out your window. I wouldn’t want to touch the diaper, but for this I’d get some welding gloves and a close pin and have at you. Then you would be transformed from a virtual to a literal shithead. And it would be well deserved. So there.

So here I am, mr bad ass blog poster technology whizz, and just as I’m reaching for the mouse to click the “post” button on a lovingly crafted post that frankly cures cancer and world hunger, I bump my mouse’s back button and poof the post of the century is gone, shattered into tiny little ones and zeros and I’m staring at a page I just don’t want to be starting at. Then the cursing starts. And the stomping. And the breaking of things.

I just know that God is sitting on her pinkly padded thrown cackling and and pointing her nice manicured and jewelery adorned finger at me. “I told you to use a more robust tool to post to your blog, you putz,” she says, followed by a Nelson-esc “haw haw”. I bite my tongue, swallowing a spicy retort. God, you can have your laugh. For now.

True, I’ve been meaning to research tools for posting to my blog. I supposed God can take credit for the notion, but either way, I’m done typing into this frackin’ web site to post to my blog. Each time is accompanied with anxiety that just this scenario will be played out, just as it has, with just the dastardly consequences to be felt by little ol’ me. God laughing at me frankly doesn’t help much. But since I’m not omniscient (like SOME people) I guess I learn from my mistake. I’ll never type my posts into IE again. We’ll, except for this one.

As God is my witness, this technology crap is going to be the death of me.

Go to http://www.kingkongmovie.com/ and click the trailer button. What in the name of holy hell randolf? Suddenly I’m on a page on Volkswagen’s website with no apparent way to view the trailer. I do see a King Kong graphic but have no clue what it means. Someone deserves a good bitch slap for this bull shite. What unbelievable stupidity. Furthers my low opinion about the type of folks who decide things like this. Did a group of monkeys decide this was a good idea around a banana buffet in a conference room somewhere? Jeez, I’m stunned. This instantly soured me on the King Kong movie. My interest was peeked for a few minutes today and now they can fricking talk to the hand. I don’t want to hear it. Enjoy your bananas dumb asses.

[Edit]
Here’s the actual trailer. In case you care. Which I don’t. Ok, maybe I do a little. But still, lameness abounds.