Sunday, September 04, 2011
Boxing Day
I have gone to the Redbox at Wal-Mart with my mother and it has ended with the predictable bloodshed.
I begged her to go to the one at County Market, a mere block away, but it was deemed too distant. What I knew and she failed to understand is that the Wal-Mart Redbox is advanced citizenship. The people of Wal-Mart know their way around a Redbox. You have to be ready.
Ready we were not. The line was four people deep when we got there and I tried to get my mother to focus by browsing the titles displayed on the Redbox sign from behind a rack of crop tops for preteens, but it was hopeless. She kept asking me if I thought we could get The Help or Contagion, which I'm pretty sure hasn't even opened in theaters yet. Then when we got our turn at the 'box, the search function utterly eluded us, and we ended up scrolling through all of the titles only to find that everything my mother thought she might want was already out of stock. And then we ended up in a rather detailed discussion of whether anyone in our family had ever expressed any interest in seeing Source Code, at which point the exorbitantly fat family behind us began sighing meaningfully. By the time my mother began soliciting a full plot summary of The Adjustment Bureau (which she kept calling The Apartment Bureau), things almost came to blows.
We ended up running away and instead purchasing a four-week supply of Crest Whitestrips. We may not have anything to do tonight, but at least we'll have glamorous smiles.
I have gone to the Redbox at Wal-Mart with my mother and it has ended with the predictable bloodshed.
I begged her to go to the one at County Market, a mere block away, but it was deemed too distant. What I knew and she failed to understand is that the Wal-Mart Redbox is advanced citizenship. The people of Wal-Mart know their way around a Redbox. You have to be ready.
Ready we were not. The line was four people deep when we got there and I tried to get my mother to focus by browsing the titles displayed on the Redbox sign from behind a rack of crop tops for preteens, but it was hopeless. She kept asking me if I thought we could get The Help or Contagion, which I'm pretty sure hasn't even opened in theaters yet. Then when we got our turn at the 'box, the search function utterly eluded us, and we ended up scrolling through all of the titles only to find that everything my mother thought she might want was already out of stock. And then we ended up in a rather detailed discussion of whether anyone in our family had ever expressed any interest in seeing Source Code, at which point the exorbitantly fat family behind us began sighing meaningfully. By the time my mother began soliciting a full plot summary of The Adjustment Bureau (which she kept calling The Apartment Bureau), things almost came to blows.
We ended up running away and instead purchasing a four-week supply of Crest Whitestrips. We may not have anything to do tonight, but at least we'll have glamorous smiles.
