1. The first in blinkernomics is the guy who puts on the blinker too late. You know, the guy who cuts you off and puts on the blinker when he’s already in your lane. Excuse me sir, you’ve already cut me off, please don’t use the blinker now just to patronize me. Bastard.

2. The guy who leaves the blinker on no matter what. We’ve all seen this guy and we’ve all been this guy. I don’t know what is going on inside our heads, but it better be good. You never know if he wants to switch lanes or if he just plum forgot. Bastard.

3. Blinker? What’s that? The guy who just doesn’t know what the hell the blinker is. Driving where he pleases without the use of a blinker period. Those of you on the West Coast know what I mean. Sorry to ‘harsh your mellow’ but that is a standard option in your car, so use it, damn it. Bastard.

They made their new ‘butterfly’ card (Mariah Carey is all over this) foldable and portable. You can unfold and use it normally or you can fold it up and just reveal the magnetic stripe. Maybe I’m crazy, but is’t the whole purpose of signing the card on the back is to check for identity? Insanity. Hey why don’t we just walk up and say ‘charge (insert name here)’ and walk away? Or better yet let’s just get multiple cards with REALLY high limits and just hand them to the thieves?

Sorry it’s Friday and when I read this about the AMEX card, i had to flip my sh*t, being a victim of identity theft.

The Republicans in Congress want to pass a $100 gas rebate to offset the rising costs of gas. BUT, this opens up the possibility to “explore” for oil in the wildlife refuge in Alaska. I find this utterly ridiculous. Not only will this not happen, gas prices are just going to go up more in the coming weeks. Once the summer travel season begins, we will see airlines and gas stations go up in price. Oh, nevermind the fact that we have to air condition our homes. If the government REALLY wanted to do something, just drop the gas prices about $.10 cents a gallon and it will definitely offset the prices. Seeing it over $3/gallon is just visually expensive. Here in Maryland, the gas stations with prices in the high $2.90’s are already seeing shortages. Now hurry up and lower prices instead of this $100 gas rebate that we MIGHT receive in 6 months.

Remember the good old days when we got the textbook in elementary school and even if was an edition or two behind we would still use it? Well we should continue to do that now. The main excuse that professors use, is that we need to learn the newest stuff and stuff their pockets as well, if they wrote teh book. I look at this business as a monopoly of some sort. I mean, we HAVE to study and we HAVE to buy the book required by the course. I find this to be horsesh*t.

We need to go back to the signing out of books for the semester and returning them to the program. The class that the program is in should pay for the book and if you need to make notes in a book, then purchase, but if not, there are things called notebooks. When the semester is over, they can return the book to the program and they can use it for the next semester. What does the program do about the outdated books? Well, you give them to high schools or other smaller colleges at a lower cost than what they are paying for them. That way everyone wins. Or they can turn around and sell them to the student at a discounted rate. Heck, we all get screwed when we sell them back to the bookstore, especially if it is an edition behind.

So go look for the book at your local library if you can and they can probably find one for you somewhere, or a buddy from another college. There are ways around this and voice your concerns to the university, but who’s going to listen? Obvisouly, not them because they get a cut of every book that gets sold. Damn capitalism.

The next thing I did was call the Customer Service desk. The Customer Service desk has access to the databases in the warehouse and other goodies that the store clerks may not have. Sometimes they can be quite friendly, but most of the time they talk to you as if you were a 12 year old. In this case, she transferred me directly to someone working in the warehouse that works on stocking items. He confirmed that they were in stock. So I hopped into my car and headed off to the store.

About a 12 minute drive later I arrived at the store and went to the customer service desk and asked to buy an Xbox and I got a roll of the eyes and she asked me who told you that we had them. And I replied, “I saw on the internet that you had some in stock and I spoke with someone in the warehouse.” She reluctantly got her manager to open the “locked” area where they were put and told me that I was lucky to get one. Now wait one dog gone minute. These employees were trying to horde them for themselves so they can buy them. I mean, a red employee work shirt does not give you the power to allow a consumer to purchase what he/she wants. They were speaking to me as if they held the key to a vault that held the Holy Grail or something.

Anyways, they handed it over and I paid my $425 bucks and walked out with my Xbox. As I was walking out, I just thought to myself, “Who do these people think they are, to reluctantly give me a product that I want to buy with my hard earned money, just so they can make us feel guilty because we didn’t camp out overnight for one on launch day?” I thought that this might be the only Circuit City that would treat me this way, but no the story gets better…

Consumers have spent billions of dollars upgrading their VCR’s to DVD players and new home theater systems to boot. To get a better picture we used to have to buy an S-Video or component video cable to get better color and a sharper picture. Then came DVI with the advent of HD television and LCD monitors. And now the HD DVD. Think of all those episodes of Cribs on MTV and the hundreds and even thousands of DVD’s that they have now all need to be replaced! Not only will some people have multiple copies of movies, they will have to pay even more for these pieces of plastic.