Black Friday might be a huge shopping day for you, or maybe you stay in. For us? We sit back and watch society devolve all on its own. It’s the only day where we shut down our main office and hold viewing parties for bad behavior that you can’t even blame on us. Okay, that’s not true. We have a hand in those “deals” that are advertised and the hours that the stores stay open, but that’s it, I swear. The rest of the nightmare is all yours, guys.
Like I said, we have viewing parties. We open up a massive part of the Snowflake Web to our employees and allow them to sign up to stream specific feeds. This year, thanks to my amazing abilities to impale the lesser Geek-dom on basketballs, I have secured the feed for one of the largest department stores in the country. If anyone recalls the viewing parties from prior years, the most choice feeds were held back for “research purposes.” My superior sleuthing skills, coupled with my aforementioned impaling abilities uncovered a conspiracy within a conspiracy. There was no “research” going on! They were hoarding the footage in the sub-basement and laughing their asses off at those of us stuck with the boring stuff. And they weren’t even watching it – they were watching us watching the monotony of the local K-Mart.
So, in celebration of guaranteed entertainment, I have started a drinking game. Play along at home if you’ve got access to the Snowflake Web.
You shall drink if:
- Someone is blasting Christmas music on their cellphone, despite the store also playing Christmas music at the same time.
- Someone is Skyping while wandering around without regard to nearby shoppers.
- A customer sends a store employee into a stock room to find something and then knocks on the door every ten seconds to see if the employee found it yet.
- A store employee looks like they might just slit their wrists right at the register.
- A customer parks a triple stroller right in the middle of an intersection between several busy walkways and effectively blocks all traffic. The reason matters not.
- The store plays the same song three times in a row, even if the song is by different artists.
- Someone gets huffy at the register despite having just arrived and being next in line.
- A customer gets angry because the prices don’t match their sales flyer from last year’s Black Friday.
- A customer gets angry because the store doesn’t carry a brand that ceased to exist fifteen years ago.
- An in-store traffic jam causes an elderly woman to launch into a full-blown temper tantrum.
- A toddler has a meltdown because someone’s stellar parenting skills have kept that kid awake for the past 16 hours. Bonus drink if the same stellar parent yells at the kid for having a meltdown.
- A customer completely destroys a table of folded anything. Shirts, towels, pants. It doesn’t even matter. It was folded nicely before they opened and now it’s a volcano of crap.
- A customer drags an employee around for longer than 15 minutes asking, “How much is this?” for just about everything in sight. Additional bonus drinks for every 30 minutes that this continues.
- Someone threatens to throw a trash can through the window of a store whose doors are already unlocked and open.
- Citing the need to “check and make sure everything is there,” a customer removes the product from each box in a display…and then decides not to purchase any of it.
There’s no drinking for actual violence. You’d black out before an hour into the viewing party. Also, I’m making Virgin Heart guacamole. It’s a new recipe so feedback is welcome.