...Nine Little Alligators: November 2009

Everywhere I turn, I am hassled by idiots. It's as though the entire world has lost its mind. Walmart completely, totally, moved EVERYTHING in the store. Nothing is where it used to be. And while the move is completely completed and over and done, stuff isn't even where the signs say it is. I mean big stuff, too, like the pharmacy department. Outside, over the two front doors... one door is labeled "Food" and the other says "Home and Pharmacy". Guess what!?! If you go in the door with the huge, red, six-foot-high letters saying "Home and Pharmacy", you have to walk 400 feet -- PAST THE OTHER DOOR -- to get to the Pharmacy! And get this! When you walk in, pass the greeter handing out stickers, and get past that first aisle that has the daily specials... guess what the first "department" is now... right up front next to the cash register lines? Nope, it's not the stuff you expect, such as candy, gift cards, envelopes, office supplies, or other high-volume stuff that people say, "hey, I need to run into Walmart and pickup some..." convenience goods. Nope. The first aisles, right up front next to the cash register lines, contain .... curtains, window shades, and door mats. I'm not fooling! Why is this stuff right up front? How many people "run into Walmart" to pick up window shades and curtains? Common sense says you want to put stuff right up front that turns over in "sole purchases". I mean, get real, the computers can now tell you which items people buy by itself, so why not make it convenient for your customers by putting that stuff right up front, where people can run in, pick it up, pay for it, and be on their way without having to hike to the back of the store for it, navigating around the women's lingerie, men's belts and suspenders, children's footwear, and other stuff that I guarantee none of those "convenience shoppers" are going to take the time to buy on such a trip anyway. Stupid. They stopped stocking my cat treats and my favorite plastic storage boxes, but now they have a full aisle of ... treadmills! Yep, a WHOLE STINKING AISLE full of treadmills! Those same $400 exercise machines you see in the want ads for '50-dollars or best offer', that you find on Freecycle for 'come pick up and its yours'. And the treadmills are conveniently located right next to -- the aquariums and fish tank supplies, right where you'd expect them, right? And guess what's now taking up a full third of the entire back wall of the store? Big-screen TV's! And at the end of the line of TV's you find... paper towels, toilet paper, napkins, paper plates, and aluminum foil. Yep, that stuff is no longer in the food section, it's next to the big screen TV's, so that shoppers can conveniently pick up their toilet paper right after putting their big-screen TV in their cart. So while looking for light bulbs in an aisle in the new sporting goods department, you can bump into college students doing their grocery shopping traveling from the milk department through the gun and ammo and the paint departments on their way to get their paper towels. Do you see a pattern here? And the main food section, what's been left intact, hasn't been spared from the madness either. They've completely removed all those overhead signs that used to hang from the ceiling over the aisles in the food section. You know the ones -- that say "Canned Vegetables", "Soup", "Crackers", "Sodas", "Sugar", "Flour", "Juices", and "Pet Food"... that were put there so you could look up from the front of the store and quickly find out which aisle to walk over to in order to find what you're looking for. Yeah. They've taken them down. They no longer exist. They've replaced them with -- get this! -- little signs posted all up and down the aisle on the top shelf of each individual aisle. If you are standing at the end of an aisle, you can see the first sign on the left that says "Canned Vegetables" and the first on the right that says "Snacks", and that's all. But if you walk down the aisle a little way, then you can read the second sign posted on the top shelf on the left that says "Canned Fruits" and the second one on the right that says "Nuts and Popcorn". The signs are too little to be read from the end of the aisle -- you have to walk down the aisle -- and besides, the ones at the far end of the aisle are hidden behind the first ones. Hello!? Is anybody out there?! I don't like having to walk down every single aisle to find the one with the sign that says "Canned Juices"! If I'm going to walk down the aisle anyway, I'm just going to be looking for my juice brand, not some dumb little sign on the top shelf that says "Juices". If I can see the new "Juice" sign, I can see the juice itself, Dumbo. What I need are the overhead signs so I know which aisle to walk down. Geez. Okay, so I get my juice, and a big huge shrink-wrapped economy size pack of 24 paper towels, and I go to the self-checkout kiosk. I scan the paper towels (to my surprise it scans correctly), and the machine says, verbally, "Item scanned, please place item in the bag." Say what?! I'm looking straight at the display screen which correctly lists "24-pack paper towels", and the stupid machine is telling me to "put it in the bag"? Incredible. The bag is only about 13-inches square, and the paper towel pack is at least three feet by four feet! How am I supposed to cram the jumbo paper towel pack in the bag? I put the paper towel pack on the surface beside the bag, and the machine won't let me continue... it keeps saying, "place the item in the bag" ostensible because it's trying to weigh the item to make sure I didn't put two of them in the bag! I end up having to call over the clerk -- which means that the sign lies when it says, "Self-Checkout". The clerk can't get the machine to accept my paper towels either, and I end up standing in another line so a real checkout clerk can check me out. The world is full of idiots. And they all seem to be attracted to ME.

With only two readers responding, it hardly seems worth the trouble anymore. The doctor today diagnosed me with the H1N1 flu. And he also said I have asthma. Pretty bad, too. Hmmm. Where have I heard that before? Medical science never ceases to amaze me. Dubby got me a new cell phone today: a Palm Treo. Used, but new to me. The keyboard is about a third the size of the V-thing she got me last month which had, I thought at the time, the tiniest keyboard imaginable. But I'm more familiar with the Palm operating system so I figured I woudl prefer it. Or at least I thought I would -- before I turned the new thing on. They've gone and done changed everything! Why do these designers take a good thing and screw it up? While I'm on that subject... Dubby got me some malted milk balls, one kind of candy I really really love. Being a Halloween-type item, they come 2-3 balls in a little snacky pack, sealed in plastic. If you don't have a pair of scissors handy, the plastic might as well be steel-coated kevlar... the packs are absolutely impossible to open with your bare hands. There's no perforation to tear, no indicator "open here", no "pull tab to open", no dotted line to indicate a designed-in weakness for the opening -- no nothing. The balls are sealed inside safer than Tutankomen was sealed in his pyramid. And unless I go to the kitchen drawer and use some kind of miracle to find the scissors, those balls will remain sealed inside the plastic just as long as Tut was in his tomb. Why don't the packaging designers realize that at some point in time, someone MIGHT want to get the product OUT of the package? I'm surrounded by idiots.