Like Sarah Palin's Hair

I had a day exactly like Sarah Palin's hair. A rats nest of Mess in the back, and hanging in greasy strings down my forehead in the front, obscuring my vision. Yep, that just sums it up!!!

The ultimate bed-head kind of day.First off, my printer DIED. Yes, another one bites the dust. I've owned 2 computers in my lifetime and during that same span I've gone through 7 or 8 printers. And these aren't cheap babies, either!

In the midst of printing out a time-sensitive document (doesn't that sound awesome and virtual?) (Actually it was a birthday card, ha-ha) I noticed that the printer was no longer making thunking noises. Or scritching noises.

Thunk. Scritch. Thunk. Scritch. Dead Silence.

I tried to reboot, unplug and replug, threaten and cajole but nothing worked. The printer had gone to it's Great Beyond.

Scrutinizing my harried schedule for the day, I realized that if I wanted to avoid the horrid Sunday is Mexican Father Day at Walmart, I had better just head on over there at 7:00 am before going to work.

For those not in the know or not from the West Coast, it is standard operating procedure for Hispanic Men to bring their litters of children to the Walmart on Sunday afternoon's and just turn them loose to romp and play in the aisles. My guess is that it's the free version of taking them to Disneyland. They get to play with all the toys with no consequences if they break them or leave them strewn about the floor; they get to race through the aisles knocking the slow and plodding into the $5 DVD bins; they get to squirt each other with shaken orange soda bottles and SCREAM!!! They do a lot of screaming.

So there I was at 7 am with my broken printer standing in line behind a woman who had a giant plastic zippered bag like comforters or bedding come in, FILLED to capacity with chatcke's she was returning. My first thought was that she knocked over a Walmart truck in some kind of midnight heist, but in fact she had receipts for each item she was returning. Separate receipts. Which she had to dig through in order to match them up with the appropriate return.

She was returning things like a paper towel holder. And a box of bobby pins. And a brown bathroom rug and a brown bathroom mat. And some crackers. And some kiddy socks. My guess is she had about 20 items, and right in the middle of this drama she abruptly left the window, and raced off into the store to find an item so that it could be scanned for the appropriate code.

I was staring at my cell phony, realizing that my time was running thin when she returned with towel in hand and her business was concluded.

My transaction took mere moments because I had no box and no receipt. I know, I know, you are supposed to keep those things but I don't. Basically I was turned down flat AND to top it off she wouldn't even throw the useless printer away for me. She said, "What if you came back later and wanted to dig it out of the garbage? We can't be responsible for that."

AS IF!!! Like who would want to come back later and dig something out of the garbage?

So I hauled the printer outside of the store and threw it into the garbage can by the front door and proceeded to race back in and buy the quickest, cheapest printer I could grab and be on my way.

I had 15 minutes to go before I would be late so I raced at incredible speeds down the freeway and through the backstreets to my client's house.

Except when I got to her street it was cordoned off with a big sign that said, "Closed for the Cowtown Marathon". What the *!*%&#@???

I was doomed. There appeared to be one thousand slow moving people strolling aimlessly down the center of the street headed who knows where. It was more like a Cowpoke Marathon if you ask me.

Now, Land Park is an area of town where the streets go bendy-bendy. There is no such thing as just going around the block or taking a parallel street to get close to where you need to be. Streets veer off in all directions and intersect each other in 5 way stops. It's designed to Hex the Outsiders, is my guess. Because Land Parkian's don't take kindly to folks they don't KNOW coming around their town.

After sneaking through an abandoned road barrier and almost running down a small childlike volunteer who was too puny to really man her post, I was able to get within a block of my destination. But I was thwarted by a very fat copper with a BIG walkie-talkie. You know, the kind that likes to RUN things in ULTIMATE control. So I pulled out my best 'feeble female' impersonation and told him that I simply HAD to get to work because an elderly woman was depending on me for her very existance and I pointed to her front door and said, "It's just RIGHT there! And I need to pull into the driveway for emergency purposes."

He looked like he was about to tell me no, but since there weren't any cowpoker's on the block at that moment he let me mosy on down to her driveway.

I punched in the number for the teletime card with moments to spare.

After work I raced home to unpack and install my new cheap-ass printer. Only to discover that it appeared to be missing the cable that connects the printer to the computer. Reading the fine print inside the box, I saw where it read, "If this device does not come with a USB cable, you must purchase one seperately." Like: don't they KNOW? When they print up the boxes and the booklets, they don't KNOW whether they are going to include a USB cable? Like, maybe on a WHIM they will and maybe they won't???

Oh. I said "Oh."

Because that's when it struck me. The garbage. Back at Walmart. Wherein resides my USB cable in perfect condition which I threw away because I wouldn't possibly need that old thing ever again since a new printer would come with it's own new cable, because who in their right mind would ever need to go and rootle around in the walmart garbage in order to retrieve something he or she had thrown away?

Someone having a Sarah Palin's Hair kind of day, that's who!!!!