Employee Discounts

OK, I don’t remember exactly who started this, but some car manufacturer decided they were going to offer their employee discount to the general public. Now every car manufacturer in the country, and probably a few outside of it, is saying the same thing. You don’t see a car commercial any more without hearing how they now give the employee discount to everyone.

Well this is bullshit if you ask me (which you didn’t). If everyone gets the employee discount, then it is no longer an employee discount. Employees are now paying the same price for cars as the general public. Employees, therefore, are getting no discount.

So, what these guys have done is taken away an employee benefit and spun it into a marketing strategy. That’s pretty amazing, really. They must think their emplyees are pretty fucking stupid to not notice.

Free Clamshells at Best Buy

So, ever since getting a DVD burner a few weeks back, I’ve developed about a 25 disc a week habit. So I was at Best Buy replenishing my stock of DVD-R’s. Seems like every time I’m in there, the person in front of me is buying DVD’s of shitty movies. I once saw a guy buying Big Momma’s House. You know, at what point do you need to own Big Momma’s House? Was renting it not enough? Last night it was a dude buying a copy of Aliens Vs. Predator, which by pretty much all accounts, sucked. I figured it must’ve been priced to move, $1.99 or something. I made sure to check out the tag. It was $29. You know what buddy? Next time just give me the $29, I’ll kick you in the balls, and we’ll all be in about the same place. I mean fuck, I wouldn’t waste the time it took to download Aliens Vs. Predator illegally.

But anyway, it turned out that they were giving away free DVD clamshell cases with every purchase. Just the thing for a loser like me buying a stack of 50 blanks. Technically, there’s some shitty movie preview in ‘em, but those are going straight in the garbage.

So anyway, I ask the cashier, a hot young black chick, if I can have more than one. She gave me that “you did not just ask me to do that!” look that only black girls can pull off just right. I said “Hey, but they’re free!”. She said, “Yeah, but I have to give one to everybody!”. I figured that, considering she scanned it along with my spindle of blanks. Then, a funny thing happened. As she was putting my receipt in the bag, she grabbed another one and chucked it in, without scanning it. I confessed that I really just wanted the cases. “Why?” she asked. “Um…to put DVD’s in?” Kind of a silly question really.

Thing is, now I feel guilty. Not for getting an extra free DVD case, and not for throwing away the shitty preview disc, but because I probably got her fired. She’s gonna come up short on her free DVD’s, and they’re gonna go to the tape. Best Buy surely knows that most of their loss comes from within, and they’ve surely got cameras trained on the cashiers. When they see her chuck that extra one in my bag, it’s curtains.

So, in the unlikely event that you’re reading this, hot ex-Best Buy cashier, I’m sorry I cost you your job. I never expected you to actually give me any extras, and was really just messing with you, making small-talk as it were.

Science Fiction Cliches and The Musical Expression Thereof

So I came across this list of science fiction cliches. About a third of the way down the page is this one:

Eyes that glow (sometimes accompanied by minor-key chords in TV and film)

First of all, there’s no such thing as a minor-key chord. There are minor chords, but minor chords exist quite happily in major key progressions (and vice versa), especially when they’re built on the 2nd or 6th interval from the key root.

But yeah, they just meant minor chord, why get all technical, right?

Well, because glowing alien eyes are never accompanied by minor chords. They’re accompanied by diminished chords. Not only do they have the flat 3rd that the minor does, they also have a flat 5th. That makes all the difference in the world. A minor chord just sounds sad. Are glowing alien eyes sad? No. They’re fucking creepy. And for fucking creepy, diminished is definitely the way to go. If not diminished then augmeted (sharp the 3rd and the 5th), which can be pretty creepy too. Throw in a flat 7th and/or 9th for extra fun. If you can work a theramin in somewhere, all the better. Or some synth portamento.

Yeah, so exactly one of my regular readers understands what the fuck I’m talking about. And incidentally, he’s probably the only one who will appreciate the sci-fi cliches. I probably just should’ve emailed this to him, but then I haven’t posted anything here in forever.