Simple solution to lazy-arse shoplifters

I wondered why the people in the local Costco are so mental about which door you go in. Seriously - the two huge garage doors are next to each other and they start to freak out if you go in the exit hole (because its 3 feet closer to the information desk) instead of the entrance hole. Well, mystery solved. It turns out that as a deterrent for shoplifters (who wander in, pick up a tv and take it straight over to the returns desk) they put a little sticker on every item you plan to bring back as soon as you enter the store. And they're not the only ones. I've seen it in Best Buy too. And it makes complete sense! Not only does it mean that the store saves money on shoplifting bastards but it also means that it should, theoretically, be less hassle for me at the returns desk. The staff don't have to be suspicious, even if I look very shady in my flasher's mac and dark glasses, and the whole customer/employee experience is much more pleasant.

Well, thats how its supposed to work. I'm sure there are some complete arseholes who ruin it for all the other children.

I've got a cold, not a $500-a-day meth habit

I may have already mentioned the crazies that shuffle round SF screaming their murderous plans or generally being a bit weird. I am reliably informed that there is a significant meth problem in the city - a combination of the existing weed culture, the warm climate and the empathetic local hippies apparently attracts them. 


Well, it turns out that these fuckers aren't just creeping me out at the bus stop*, they are also the reason I have to sell my soul for some Beechams. 

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So, I troll over to the pharmacy to pickup some hardcore cold medicine, and it turns out that I have to actually ask for it at the pharmacy counter. Fair enough. There's certain questions that need to be asked - do you have asthma? Are you on any other medication? And, apparently, can I have your driver's license? Yep, if you want to buy certain cough and cold medications that contain pseudo ephedrine then you'll need to provide ID to the California equivalent of a Boots saturday girl who will record it on some central database. Pseudo ephedrine is apparently a key ingredient in the production of meth, so if one tries to buy it in significant quantities, by visiting numerous pharmacies, a little red flag appears and your purchases are limited. There are two reasons why I am irritated by this. The first is that when everyone is telling me to protect my identity, forcing me to hand over all my pertinents to all in sundry when all I want is something to unclog my schnoz feels a bit wrong. The second is that the US is incapable of streamlining most of its core systems to make my life easier (tax/car insurance/sending a cheque) and yet this little database that is targeting the minority seems to be working swimmingly. 

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Oh, and if you want to get a bit of soluble aspirin to gargle with for your sore throat, good luck. Having sifted through all the utter tripe about it on the internet forums it turns out its not as readily available as it is in the UK, but you can still find it by looking for "buffered" aspirin. What? Know, right. Make it more complicated than it needs to be. Buffering is some sort of chemical process that means that it dissolves sooner, rather than coating which means it dissolves later (in your stomach). Why the manufacturers think I give a shit about the chemical process before I buy it, rather than what happens after I buy it and shove it in my cake hole, who knows.  



* SO, the first evening we ever spent in SF we accidentally walked through a less savory part of Downtown, and there was a crazy lady screaming at the bus stop that she was going to kill everyone. Welcome to California, boys and girls...

Linguistic abomination

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Dammit it is sometimes very hard not to look down on the American flavor of the English language.
Today I heard two apparent abominations in one news report. Please tell me I'm not the only one who shudders at the sound of "yearly" instead of "annually" and "fourths" instead of "quarters". I feel like we're heading down the Orwellian route to New Speak? The logic of these alternative words is obvious, but if you lose all the quirks in a language then you lose the colors you can paint with it. Plus, it sounds weird.

Needless to say I immediately Googled both these words, expecting to fuel my indignation, instead finding that they are completely acceptable, if a little bland, alternatives. Much like my initial consternation over the great date swap (writing 31st January 2015 as 01/31/15 - watt???) I'm sure I'll get over it, because although it feels like a linguistic abortion language is all about communication, and if I persist in using turns of phrase or syntax that no other bugger understands then I have missed the point entirely.

This debate normally stirs up the old chestnut "Americans don't speak proper English". Can't really be arsed with this one, but basically language is always changing and adapting. American English has evolved in a different direction to British English, but to roughly the same extent over the last 400 years. One can't expect a language to stay static, especially when it has so many varied influences on it over the course of a few centuries, and Britain and America have had incredibly different cultural and historical influences, so it would be mental to assume that we'd be speaking 17th century english right now.

I think these little linguistic differences represent the bigger cultural differences that I've mused on in the past. Basically, Limeys like pedigree and Yanks opt for convenience. We revel in the subtle distinctions between regal, royal and kingly, and our Americans cousins go for the easiest and most logical option to remember/spell/get the point across. Both are totally legitimate - language's main purpose is to communicate and if you're a new country created by immigrants from across the world your primary goal is to make your language understandable and easy to use. If you're a country that is arrogant enough to send its patrons onto the Costa Del Sol to demand beer and a fry-up in loud voices then you care less about being understood and more about showing who's boss. And then getting a pint. Which you can achieve by ridiculing the changes that have been made to the language outside its native land over the last few hundred years.

All of that said, I still feel a bit sick when people butcher my version of the language, but I'm trying to take the moral high ground here.