Special Guest Update: The Saddest Thing Ever

Due to the continued presence of my sister and her brood, I haven't been able to update the ISB with my own unique brand of sentence fragments and anger. Fortunately for my erstwhile readers (all six of you), I have a knack for getting my friends to generate content. It's part of my svengali-esque charm.

So with that in mind, I give you a Special Guest Update from none other than Tug Himself, recounting a harrowing story of customer interaction. And believe me, I was sitting ten feet away and I have a hard time believing it happened.


Click to Terror-Size it! 

Gather ‘round the campfire, children, and hear the most blood-curdling tales of macabre that your young minds can withstand… This tale is so spooky that it might make you stick your pocketknife into a nearby tree… I call this delicious dish of disgust: The Saddest Thing Ever.

So this kid comes into the store on Wednesday. I say "kid," but he was old enough to grow some bits of facial hair that looked like they belonged on Bizarro Shaggy. He looks down at the Yu-Gi-Oh cards and asks us if it’s alright if he "scales" them. This gets my usual response when asked a gaming question. I turn around and go, "Uh… Ben?"

Turns out Ben didn’t know what the kid meant either. Why? Because it’s fuckin’ insane. The young man explains. "Is it OK if I can weigh them on my scale to try and get the packs with foils in them?" Get it? Scaling. Ben cautiously says "O-Kay..."

The kid then pulls out a tiny digital scale about the size of a Gameboy Advance. You know… like the ones that drug dealers use. According to Josh, these are the scales that they have to keep locked up in Staples because drug dealers steal them all the time. I’ve always thought that weighing drugs was the only practical use for them, but now I know better.

So the guy starts weighing each pack. And he’s handling them like they were old dynamite sticks left out in the sun (you all saw the season finale of Lost, right?). While I am now content to sit back and watch this guy be pathetic, a customer comes up, seeing this guy as he weighs packs of cards made for little children, and asks the guy what he’s doing. The kid explains, and then says that he has to do this because he’s "tight on cash" and wants to "build up a good collection." I looked these miniature digital scales up, and the average cost is about fifty bucks. So was he really saving that much money?

So the guy finishes. Puts up his scale and gets the eight or so packs that he picked out. Then he goes and... wait for it... gets his mom to come and pay for them (!). That’s right. The "money" that he so desperately wants to save? Nonexistent. A falsification. A myth. Hogwash. Baloney. His mommy is buying them for him.

And that is The Saddest Thing Ever.

--Tug Baker