Message Sent and Received

I hear you Murphblog readers. When I brilliantly connected the greatest song in the history of rock and roll to writing, you yawned. When I bared my soul and shared one of my precious gastrointestinal distress poems, you checked your watch like a former President listening to his wife talk. But when in the context of a midly entertaining anecdote about swimming with my cell phone I mentioned that we at the Murph household do not have a land line, impassioned discussion took place in the comments.

So I hear you. You obviously do not visit this award-winning blog to read about the craft of writing. You do not wish to be subjected to my poetry. You're far more interested in the minutiae of my life. Fine. I understand. Really, I do. My life is fascinating.

Why, just last week I went shopping at Kohl's and promptly misplaced the "Kohl's Cash" that The Wife was going to use to buy new clothes for our daughter. She seems to think Little One should be attired in clothing that actually fits. I couldn't find the "Kohl's Cash" anywhere, so I was forced to look in the only place I hadn't--the curby. But when I opened the curby, what did I find? Maggots! Scores of them! As we had never had maggots in our curby before, I think it's safe to assume the Kohl's Cash was somewhere in there and that it had attracted flies.

And then, just yesterday, I went to Office Max to buy folders for my classroom. And they had them! For one penny apiece! As I needed about a hundred, this was an exceptional find. Until I read the sign notifying me that there was a limit of six per customer. I asked an Office Max guy if I was missing something and he said no, they were in fact one cent. "But you can only buy six," he warned. I responded, "Whose brilliant idea was that?" He said, "Not ours."

I've yet to unravel the logic behind this strategy. Normally, products get priced low because a store wants to get rid of them. Since that's obviously not the reason in this case, perhaps they were attempting altruism. In their little, pea-sized minds, they were helping struggling familes who only need to buy a couple of folders for their kids. But I'm pretty sure a family who needs a couple of folders would be willing to pay ten, twenty, maybe even fifty cents per folder. Folders don't typically break the bank. The best I can figure is that Office Max is using the one penny folders to lure educators like me into the store in the hopes that I buy something else, because who in their right mind is going to only spend six cents? They then hope that I will keep returning to the store, buying six folders and other assorted Office Max crap each time, until I have acquired the total number of folders needed and they have taken me for a swift ride on the Fleecing Express.

Well they're not going to get me. I have a way to punish these foolish retailers. It is called my debit card. I did a little online research and it seems that retailers pay between $0.35 and $0.55 per debit card transaction. So if I only buy the six folders, Office Max will lose 29-49 cents each time. Bwahaaahaaa! Maybe, after ten visits, they'll see the light and let me buy in bulk.