 |
| I teach because I care. And to avoid hosting holiday parties. |
Hi there, readers! In the first miracle of the holiday
season, I am writing a new post within seven days
of writing my last post.
Amazing! As is most of the U.S., I am preparing for Thanksgiving on
Thursday. Tomorrow I will be helping my mom with the cooking for our
Thanksgiving festivities, which will be held at noon on Thursday at my cousin's house. I am really
glad we don't have Thanksgiving at my house! In fact, becoming a teacher
has all been a carefully plotted effort to avoid hosting holiday gatherings in my home.
Without a huge paycheck, I can afford only a modest house, which basically
renders my living quarters useless for gatherings of 30+ people. I am amazed at
my foresight!
Now, I don't know about you, but I tend to consume more food
than I usually do on Thanksgiving. Also, since I will be off work, and I have
no children or visiting relatives to entertain, I will be blessed with most of
the day left to do WHATEVER I WANT.
These two factors will culminate in the only logical result: endless hours of
napping while attempting to watch last week's episode of How to Get Away
With Murder. I'm sure that after restarting it approximately 752 times, and sleeping through it almost that many times, I will come to the conclusion that
the Taco Bell Chihuahua killed Sam.
But, I digress. My real reason for writing this post is to
say that Black Friday has gotten totally out of hand in the past ten years. It
has slowly become an event that doesn't just include a sane person's shopping
hours on Friday, but has also taken over Thanksgiving. I worked retail the
entire time I was in college, and I can assure you that if anyone working in a
store at 10 PM on Thanksgiving night smiles at you, it is only because gritting
their teeth and sporting a maniacal grin is the only way they can keep
themselves from bashing you over the head with that Farberware frying pan you
have been examining and asking them questions about for the past 30 minutes.
Nobody wants to work on Thanksgiving night, or at 2 AM on
Friday morning, or at 6 AM on Friday morning! Retail workers do not get a lot
of time off, and don't have the luxury of having their weekends as protected
leisure time. Plus, they have to deal with the entire gamut of psychoses that
presents itself in human beings, a fact to which I can personally attest from
experience! Why not open stores at the normal time on Friday, or even a little
later to allow workers to recover from their tryptophan induced
post-Thanksgiving hangovers?
 |
| Nothing captures the magic of the holiday season quite like riding at top speeds in the back of an ambulance after being thrown from an escalator! |
People could still shop just as much, and the only
consequence would be that daytime crowds might
be a little bit larger. To make
up for the lack of drama and frenzy that doing away with insane Black Friday
retail hours would bring, I propose that all stores simply run their escalators
as fast as they will go, and set their automatic doors to open and close at random
intervals without warning. Both of these changes would certainly make up for
the lack of Black Friday excitement, and would replace it with the thrill of
riding at top speeds in the back of an ambulance!
Also, since we now have that amazing thing called the
Internet, why not just sit at home on your couch in your pajamas on
Thanksgiving night and shop some of the Black Friday sales that online
retailers will surely present? That way, between commercials during that Law
and Order marathon, you can purchase DVDs of tv shows that are already on
Netflix for rock-bottom prices! I am sure there has to be some poor guy who
will have to work on Thanksgiving night at the Amazon.com offices, but at least
he won't have to deal with half-crazed, overly full shoppers in person!
Instead, he can also watch the Law and Order marathon while getting the site
running again after that amazing 60% off deal on the complete series of Saved
by the Bell: The New Class caused it to crash.
Personally, for me Black Friday is aptly named because I
will spend half of the day napping and looking at the black behind my eyelids.
I really dislike shopping in person, and consider a trip to the
mall to be tantamount to attending a three-hour spinning class at a gym where
everyone is more attractive and thinner than I am (Also known as something so
horrifying that I would sooner watch a twenty-four hour nonstop marathon of Mama's
Family than participate in it). I am pretty sure that retail workers feel
the same way about working on Thanksgiving or on Black Friday.
So, my advice is that you stay home on Thanksgiving night,
and that you don't go to the store on Friday morning any earlier than the time
at which you would have woken up with a hangover on any given Sunday morning
when you were between the ages of 18 and 24. Stay home with your family and
give thanks for the fact that you have the luxury of worrying about things like
when to buy Christmas presents, rather than about much more dire things, like
the fact that you have never seen an episode of Game of Thrones, and therefore
can't understand half the memes on the Internet. I promise, you won't be sorry!
No comments:
Post a Comment