Department of Lessons Learned

Today, I learned to feel another's pain. Even worse, because it was CD's pain I taught myself to feel.

You see, I was shopping at my local independent deli/grocer and as I prepared to pay, the clerk just stood there staring at me like "WTF are you handing me a Floppy Disk for!!?!?!"

I politely informed her that if she simply booted it, she would find I had plenty of credits I had earned volunteering at the Leftorium's OSCON booth last year in Portland.

But you know what she did? She just stared at me and told me thay could only accept legitimate forms of payment!!!!!11!1!!!!!1

Legitimate forms of payment?! Legitimate forms of payment!!!!

I gave her a thorough rundown of what different cultures accept as payment in other parts of the world, all which fell to nothing on her deaf ears. I wish she was mute instead of deaf to my explanations.

I told her that her salary comes from paying customers like me and that if she likes her check and no benefits, she better load my disk and bag my purchase.

Again, she reiterated that she could only accept legitimate forms of payment and reminded me that there were other people in the store, people with real money who were anxious to check out.

That was it!! I asked if she could point me to an electrical outlet and provide the wifi key to the store so I could boot my OpenBSD laptop and show her my credits myself!

Can you believe this! She told me "no, I "can't do that", I'm the "cashier" and that they "don't have a wifi network" !!!!!!!! Is this a independent grocer or a Nazi Germany?

I told her this was the last time I was shopping there, and left, furious after asking her for her and her supervisors' SecondLife avatar names. I went across the street to the Free Geek drop in center, booted my floppy in exchange for a vegan brownie baked by the admin tranny and set off to educate some fresh young minds.

The avatar's names she'd provided for SecondLife ((You Are A Pathetic Looser, Get the Fuck out of my Store) were going to get a griefing they'd never seen before. Before I was done with them, they'd wish they'd never left orientation island.