see no evil, hear no evil....

Well Blogger was official blocked at work today, which means no blogging at work right? Wrong! These people really don’t realize that unless they block the internet in general, people can keep blogging. Hell they could block the internet in its entirety and if I felt compelled to, I could update via text and picture messages. Well I applaud their effort as weak sauce as they are. Onto the subject at hand…

Eve and I were killing some time over the weekend looking for a backpack for her triumphant return to academia. Without any good idea where one would go about finding your run-of-the-mill JanSport bag we headed to our local shopping mall. A side note about this mall in particular, it’s where they filmed the mall scene for Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. If you haven’t seen this movie you should, if only for 80's pop culture references. In thinking about the Wild Stallions (see pop culture reference) I laugh because I've realized that Keanu Reeves has not matured as an actor one iota since his role as Ted "Theodore" Logan. Back to the subject at hand, while meandering through this enormous monument to commerce, we walked in and out of possible stores that might carry a backpack to Eve's liking. All the time being hit up by the sales people in the kiosks in the center of the mall thoroughfares. Now these generally rude, but just doing their job sales people place me a huge moral conundrum. We’ve all had jobs that we didn’t like, or didn’t want. The jobs might have even been a bit demeaning at times, but you do them regardless. You have to pay the bills right? Also I always try to treat people that work in retail, food service, or any other customer service position with respect and a bit of class because I remember being shit on while working the counter at the grocery store, working retail at a sporting goods store, but basically so they don't spit (if you're lucky) in my food. I always hated it and I attempt as much as I can not to be that guy we all loathed.

So here is the crux, if you don’t ignore these people and pretend they don’t exist they won’t leave you alone to save your life. It used to be that you could just say, “no thanks” or “I’m not interested today” but now-a-days if you even acknowledge their existence they will hound you like those kids in Mexico trying to sell you Chiclets. So what do you do? Pretend as if they don’t exist like some upper-middle class, nose in air, raging asshole, or hang-out for 5 minutes with every high school girl regurgitating a sales script about the amazing moisturizing effects of this particular hand lotion? I’m sure many of these people understand why they are ignored, hell many of them probably get off work and walk the mall ignoring their peers. I just wish I didn’t have to pretend like I don’t hear them, avoid looking them in the eye, and basically treating them like a sub-class of human beings.