Ticked-off Thursday

I shot a few photos of Tucker, the neighborhood red heeler, waiting patiently outside the fence for our dogs to come out to play this morning.

Not that I could post any photos from home, since our cable and internet have been down since early yesterday afternoon. (I expected to find everything functioning when I got up this morning, but we are apparently not a priority for conFusion Media. Yes, I’m back to calling them conFusion because the level of service since last fall has been infuriatingly substandard.)

And my memory card reader has gone walkabout, hiding sufficiently well that I couldn’t find it this morning, even with the help of St. Anthony.

I had to go into town anyway to take Maria’s cell phone to her so I went to the Office Depot store, only to find aisle after aisle of empty shelves and a notice that the store is closing May 16 to consolidate operations with the Office Max store down the street. Office Depot only had SD card readers left – no help for me since my Nikon D200 uses CompactFlash memory cards.

Down the street at Office Max, they’re out of the card reader I need too.

“We can order it for you,” the minimum wage girl offered.

“Never mind. I can get it from Amazon in two days and probably cheaper,” I replied, testily, and stalked out.

I’d had thoughts of cashing in an empty coffee bag for a free cup of dark roast at Starbucks, just to see how their idiotic campaign of chatting up customers on the subject of race relations is going, but I realized my mood was too foul for a civil exchange with a 20-something barista who thinks idealistic good intentions trump real life experience. I’m in no mood to suffer preachy children without lapsing into profanity.

So I opted for a cheese Danish, coffee and free Wifi at Panera where I used my iPhone to order a memory card reader from Amazon.com for less than $8 with free shipping and delivery promised by Saturday.

Fuck off, Office DepotMax.