Christmas Shopping

Hey there, and welcome to the official Dan West Comedy blog! Here you’ll find periodic updates on my thoughts, ramblings, rants, and every now and then a nugget of positivity. This time, in honor of the season, I thought I’d spend a little time talking about Christmas shopping. On Saturday I went out in Evansville, Indiana to finish my Christmas shopping, and nothing has ever made me more certain that humanity needs to be wiped out. Like Ellen Ripley from Aliens said, we need to nuke the site from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure. (Editor’s note: Dan is not specifically saying Evansville should be wiped out, he means all of humanity.)

A lot of people think that I hate Christmas, so they tend to ignore when I have complaints about the season. I don’t hate Christmas, I hate that it gets celebrated earlier and earlier every year, and I hate how aggressive people are when you question why. This year, people were talking about Christmas on November 1st. A co worker put up her tree the weekend after Halloween, another person was playing Christmas music on her phone. And when I pointed out that it might be a little early for all that (you know, since there were still two federal holidays prior to December), I get accused of being hateful. I don’t hate Christmas, I just don’t love it so much that I need to spend 7 weeks prepping for it. And that doesn’t make me weird, cruel, or mean. It means I’m a normal human being who doesn’t feel the need to skip ahead and tap into Christmas serotonin when it’s still 60 degrees in Northern Indiana. Also, even if I did hate Christmas, that wouldn’t automatically mean my criticism was unjust. I hate Matchbox 20 like a Business Insider article hates millennials, but that doesn’t automatically mean I’m wrong when I point out the harmful mental health imagery in the song “Unwell.” The imagery isn’t why they’re a bad band, but it’s a contributing factor.

So keep all of that in mind when I tell you that I would rather go back to Iraq than Christmas shop ever again. This is supposed to be the season of giving, peace on earth, and good will to your fellow human. So why are you cutting people off in aisles to grab some mass produced plastic nonsense your kid will forget about in a day or two? Why are you getting into a turn lane, then going straight, nearly colliding with turning cars and cutting off the people actually in the straight lane? At least in Jingle All The Way, Arnold was driving like a maniac to see his kid’s belt advancement ceremony. He didn’t start the Christmas shopping insanity until he thought his wife was going to fuck Phil Hartman.

There were two specific moments I want to complain about from my Christmas shopping experience. The first was Wal Mart. And I get it, it’s my own fault for going to Wal Mart on the Saturday before Christmas. My expectations were low, but they managed to fail even those. First, there were 5 cashiers despite approximately 15 cash registers. The cashiers were doing an awesome job despite terrible circumstances. They were friendly, quick, and solved problems very efficiently. But I could count them on one hand, and it was the Saturday before Christmas in the third biggest city in the state. I didn’t expect much, but half your registers being open would have been a good start. “But Dan, Wal Mart has rolled out self checkout lanes. Why wouldn’t you use one of those?” First off, because I’m not going to contribute to a billion dollar company hiring even fewer people. Self checkout lanes are just another way for companies to keep people out of work. Second, because self checkout lanes can’t do everything I need, even if I were willing to use one. I can’t purchase and load a gift card at a self checkout lane. And third, even if I were willing to use a self checkout lane, and if it could do everything I needed it to, this Wal Mart had fewer than half of its self checkout lanes open. I don’t know if they were broken or the manager just wanted to hold his power over our heads, but self checkouts were also not an option.

The other moment that drove me nuts was at a sporting goods store. I sat in line behind a woman for close to ten minutes before she got to the register. I figured it would be a quick process, all she had was a single pair of sweatpants. I was a little annoyed she was buying sweatpants here, but that was just general irritation with the situation. When things went legitimately bad was when the woman announced to the cashier that the sweatpants she’d chosen didn’t have a price tag and she didn’t remember what the cost was on the display. This lead to the employee spending ten minutes trying to figure it out. I’m not mad at the employee. She could have been new, she could have been seasonal, she could have just been stressed out and not handling it well. Her not being able to immediately solve the problem is not what I take issue with. The problem I have is that this customer walked past at least the same three employees I did to get to the line, and at no point did she think to ask one of them for the price, or if there was one in back stock. No, she waited almost twenty minutes altogether because she wanted a medium pair of grey Adidas sweatpants, and for that, I want her on the front lines when we go to war with the machines.

I think I’m going to close out my blogs here with something I enjoy, to take some of the sting off of the negativity. This time around, I’d like to highlight a podcast favorite of mine. It’s called Nerd Rage: The Great Debates, and it’s run by a very talented group of comedians and actors in the San Francisco Bay Area. For the past nearly three years, this group has put out a weekly podcast where show creators Kristee Ono, Marc Abrigo, Stephen Ku, Tirumari Jothi, and Wonder Dave are joined by guests from all over the country to debate various nerdy topics. I was on the GenCon episode, where I took the side of Deadpool in a three way “who would you want to save you from the top of a burning building: Deadpool, Mario, or GenCon attendees” match. These are a lot of fun, my recent favorite was the Black Friday special, where a group debated which Friday was their favorite. Check them out at https://nerdragepodcast.com/

That’s all for now gang, have a wonderful holiday.