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O Karma Tree, O Karma Tree
How do I deserve bad karma for shopping at Wal-Mart? Let me count the ways.... of course, there's always shopping at Wal-Mart in the first place. Not that I have local options to speak of that I'm failing to patronize, but I could choose a corporation that's, shall we say, differently-eviled. That's only the beginning though: I'm sure I scored some seriously bad karma for buying an artificial Christmas tree when I live a stone's through away (almost literally) from Indiana County, Pennsylvania, "The Christmas Tree Capital of the World." So there, I guess I did have a local option, but the fact is that I'm addicted to crappy artificial Christmas trees. Some babies are born addicted to crap; I was born addicted to shlock.
As a brief digression, I have to say that I grew up with the most hideously-artificial of artificial trees. The "branches" with their green plasticity hardly offered a nod to realism. It was worse even than the awful trees of our friends and neighbors with their asbestos snow, or whatever that crap was that was splattered onto some trees. I was also born addicted to cheap, so off we went to the wilderness that is Wal-Mart to choose our tree.
First stop was, of course, hardware, to get a hatchet and saw to cut down the artificial tree we wanted. The Wal-Mart employees, though, wouldn't let me cut my own tree. I think it was a liability issue. We found what seemed to us the perfect tree: it was perhaps 5' tall and cost a mere $20. Perfect! We grabbed a box and took it home.
Now, after living my whole life surrounded by fake trees (seriously--our yard was landscaped with artificial Christmas trees when I was growing up), I figured I could put this tree up in my sleep, but something just wasn't right, so I woke up and read the instructions. Oddly, the main stem in the manual bore only a vague similarity to the one that came with our tree, being too short for all the branches that came with it. And, just in case we had been tempted to use it anyway, the tree didn't come with the feet it was supposed to come with.
You know, with all the talk about people or things that are "ruining Christmas," I didn't suspect that Wal-Mart would be guilty of such a thing, but it is. Not Christmas in general, necessarily, but mine, and I'm pretty sure it's personal. Unbeknownst to most people, the greeters are Wal-Mart are actually hired for one--and only one trait. You might have suspected that trait to be "general uselessness," but in fact it's the ability to detect atheists. They caught me and ensured that I would get the messed up tree.
Sadly, like everything else around here, the Mart of Wal is almost 25 minutes away, so we had to plan a full-blown trek back to return our tree. We decided that it was better if the return was done as a stealth mission, so I sent Lauren in to do it. Sure, she's an atheist too, but she's cute enough that I thought they might be distracted or just over-look it. A pretty face can get a lot of things overlooked.
Not, apparently, atheism tangled up in the return of a defective tree. You know what they did? They claimed they were all out of the $20 trees. She couldn't trade it in for the same tree. Not that we wanted the same tree, because--duh--that one was defective, but we wanted one that scanned in for the same price.
Instead, on top of the experience of getting a faulty tree, they kindly allowed Lauren to pay an extra $20 to get a faultless tree. Well, faultless other than being a cheap (but not that cheap) fake tree. Oh, and she got the privilege of a 25-minute trip each way. So kind.
But then, that's what those scheming Wal-Mart greeters do to atheists. Don't trust their inoffensive-seeming ways of sitting around. It's all a front.