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I just spent an hour at the local Verizon store, trying to purchase a new charger for my cell phone. There were eighteen employees milling around the store, but apparently only one had received the advanced training on how to fetch a charger out of the back room, so they made Sam and I wait.

Sam does not like waiting in line. And he especially doesn't like waiting in line in the Verizon store, a feeling he communicated to me by turning bright red, clenching his face like a fist and screeching loudly while we waited for the one competent salesperson to help us.

Which I actually sort of understood. If it had been socially acceptable, I would have screamed too.

I rarely use my cell phone. My charger died weeks ago, and I've only just now gotten around to buying a replacement. Before that, my phone spent about a month sitting at the bottom of Sam's toy box. But there's something about being in the Verizon store that makes me want a new cell phone. And not just any cell phone, but one of the cool ass ones that takes pictures and can be programmed to play a Depeche Mode song when it rings.

It's sort of how I feel when I walk into the Best Buy, and immediately start coveting a flat screened television set that I can hang on my wall like a painting. And all of a sudden, I'm all like, Sure it's thousands of dollars, but just think of how freaking cool it would look in my living room. I've even gone so far as to try to figure out a way to write one of those suckers off as a business expense -- I mean, hell, I write contemporary fiction, so shouldn't vegging out in front of the television count as research?

Posted 26 April 2005 at 03:11 PM