Why is it that every time I get in line at Best Buy it turns out to be the wrong line? Not that there's usually much choice, because they ordinarily open up only enough registers so that the wait is at least twenty minutes. I don't know why they even have sixteen registers, since you rarely find more than two or three open, however long the lines are. Today I got in the "credit cards and checks only" line, thinking it would move faster. Oh, the folly.

I had finally made my way close to the front of the line. Then, after the clerk had rung up a sale, his customer pulled out a twenty dollar bill. Oh my, the turmoil that caused. Voiding the sale apparently required a manager to sign off on it, and obviously there is some rule that a manager cannot respond to the first call over the PA system. (Why doesn't an electronics store have a better PA system? It sounded like a bus depot, and I haven't been in one of those since the seventies.)

Eventually someone was found to help the kid close out the sale, and the woman was allowed to go directly to the front of one of the other lines. The people she cut in front of had somehow managed to get themselves into the proper line. They must have been as happy as I was to become a semi-permanent store fixture.

If this were an isolated incident, it might be amusing. But the joke is, every single time I go into that store something similar keeps me from getting out. Still, they must be doing something right, since I keep going back.

We had some actual rain today. Not much, and not enough to make up for something like three weeks with nary a drop, but it did seem more like winter in Northern California. Good. Let nasty old man winter blow through. Get him on his way to the shabby hovel he slinks off to when his lease runs out here. Spring cannot come too soon to suit me and my throbbing throat and my aching joints. When the sun is shining it's so much harder to get the blues, and so much easier to see the days getting longer.