By Reading This Wacky Customer Story, You Commit Yourself To Voting Democratic On Tuesday.

Power surge. It sounds like a good thing. Like maybe I turned up some sort of personal booster knob that allows me to fill prescriptions just a little bit faster, but no, a power surge is a very bad thing. A power surge can fry your fax machine, which is what we found out at my workplace. It can also knock out the electricity in the part of town where the nearest store in your giant corporate pharmacy chain is located, which happened as well. This means all the familiar lunatics I deal with were joined by a pack of unfamiliar pill craving lunatics from the other side of town. It was like a lunatic regional meeting.

At about the midpoint of the agenda, I get a phone call. A woman evidently upset that she couldn't attend the meeting in person, but determined to take part in the festivities. "YOUR CARTS ARE ALL OVER THE STREET!!!!"

For a person to get me on the phone, they have to navigate an incredibly complex voice mail system that makes it clear at several points they will be talking to the pharmacy, and giving them the option, again at more than one point, of veering off this path and talking to someone in the general store.

"Are they blocking traffic?"

"NO! THEY ARE ALL OVER THE SIDEWALK!"

Knowing that our store was physically a long way from a sidewalk, and that any stray carts from our place almost certainly would become the property of the local homeless population before they got anywhere near a sidewalk, and that the now powerless store, 5 miles away mind you, was right next to the street, I ask the nice lady, "ma'am are you talking about the store at address x? You're talking to the store at address y"

"I DON'T CARE! I'M CALLING THE POLICE!"

This was supposed to frighten me. I thought about why. Were the police going to come and arrest the shopping carts? Would they be booked and thrown in a cell without access to counsel? Might giant corpo-pharmacy's shopping carts end up as bitches to the Crips, traded to the Bloods for a carton of cigarettes?"

I never got a call from the carts asking for bail money. As a matter of fact, I never heard of the carts again. I fear they may have been stripped of their habeas corpus rights. I hope they don't end up in Guantanamo.

We live in dark times.