Claritan D… it’ll make you feel good.
“Hey, Man… You, with the stuffy nose and red eyes… you wanna get high? I’ve got it all right here: Maximum Strength Sudafed, Tylenol Cold & Sinus, Actifed, Benedryl in ten different flavors, Aleve-D, you name it! Don’t worry, this is all real, from behind the counter and 100% pure. What’s that? Ohhh… you’re serious. You’re hardcore. Yeah, I got what you’re looking for… It’ll cost you… Sweet! Here ya go, man… Claritan-D!”
More than a few people have pointedly sent me messages asking if I was dead, had lost both my hands in thresher or “got injured in some kind of horrible smelting accident” (Thank you, Caveman). I’ll have you know that I am a Class 3 Certified Smelting Instructor with a Licensed Specialization in Smelting Safety.
The truth of the matter is that I, like a lot of people, have been cursing my freely elected democratic government and plotting its overthrow due to its obvious hatred of all those United State citizens who are prone to allergies, colds, the flu or any other illness that causes one to produce snot (scientific term, from the Latin: “boogers“).
In case you haven’t been living on planet Earth very long, the US Federal Government decided last September to put Federal Government decided to put the nasal clearing wonder-drug of Pseudoephedrine in the same illegal and dangerous classification as Drano-laced crystal meth and Chinese made toys. They did this because a few bad eggs were buying truckloads of cold medicine, working voodoo magic, and ending up with a bathtub of crystal meth made from the Pseudoephedrine contained in these wonder drugs.
The logic goes like this: if one in 10,000 people out there are doing something illegal then we’d sure as hell better inconvenience and penalize the 9,999 who aren’t. As I’ve stated before, I can anonymously buy pallets of fertilizer and barrels of gasoline with nothing more than a handful of Benjamins, but I can’t go into a store and plop down a $5 bill without being tracked in a nationwide database if I want to stop my sniffles.
Of course, everyone knows that laws like these that are designed to control access to certain substances work perfectly Consider the raging success of “Prohibition” and “The War on Drugs.” Now the US is completely alcohol and drug free! Amazing!
Ahem.
In truth this new law is decreasing the amount of methamphetamines being made from cold medicine. Now the drug dealers just sell the cold medicine on the street for twice the value, skipping that whole hydrochloric acid in the bathtub thing.
Over the past nine months or so I have experienced debilitating sinus headaches, crushing ear pain, difficulty breathing and dizziness and fatigue. And no, I have not been watching prime-time television. All of this discomfort and pain comes from my obviously deficient DNA and a government that clearly wants me dead.
I have seen doctors. Lots of them. Some of them even spoke English without an accent. All of them said the same thing: “Maybe it’s a virus. We can’t treat a virus, you know. You have insurance, right?”
It’s only in the past few days that I’ve begun to feel like a normal human being thanks to some underground contacts I’ve made who have been able to buy Pseudoephedrine under their own names and then sold me their supply because I’d already met my limit for the month. It is indeed a sad day when the only thing I’ve asked for my parents as a present for Christmas is “some Aleve Cold and Sinus.”
Before I go off to stand in a steamy shower for the next 30 minutes, I wish to especially hope that Kathleen from New York, who left an excellently funny and heart-felt comment a few days ago feels better by now. At the very least I hope she’s bought some quality fake IDs so she can go from drugstore to drugstore stocking up on cold medicine.
Because, you know, those guys making meth in their basements would never be smart enough to think of that.
4 Comments » | Email Link
As I’ve written before, I was one of the luck people who was able to snag a Nintendo Wii last year. This year I want another one for my niece, but this year I’m playing it smart. I’m gong to tell you how to play it smart, too and get a Nintendo Wii while sitting around in your underwear in front of the computer all day.
ZOMG!! CLICK CLICK CLICK!!…
Calm down. This is just a graphic of the OuttaStock.com Wii Finder Widget.
Last year I did what everyone else was doing: I drove around every town every Sunday morning around 4am, found a likely store to camp out in front of and spent the next three hours standing around in the cold with a bunch of desperate parents, only to find that we had 100 people in line and the store that we were standing in front of only had 10 Wii game systems for sale. And though I used all the super-secret rumor mill forums and spoke to the retail flunkies and even found sites that showed maps of my town with likely Wii systems for sale, I realized that the whole process of chasing down something in a brick and mortar store was relatively labor intensive.
And I am, if nothing else, pretty damn lazy.
So instead of focusing on physical stores, I started paying attention to online stores. I spend 90% of my day in front of a PC, so I’m always about 30 seconds away from an online store that might be selling a Nintendo Wii.
This year there are some great services which monitor Wii availability online and notify you instantly when a Nintendo Wii is being offered for sale. There are a lot of these services, but I had some basic criteria: the service had to be easy, reliable, and FREE. There’s no guarantee I’ll get a Wii, so I didn’t see the point in paying for a service that didn’t guarantee me anything.
Here they are:
Wiialerts.com – A pretty neat service that will send you a cell phone text message or email the moment a Wii is available from one of about 14 different Wii console or bundles for sale from various vendors. The site is free and heavily emphasizes the cell phone text message over the email because text messages are apparently sent a little more instantaneously. I’ve had varying success with this service. I’ve received about 4 or 5 messages from them in the past two weeks. One was a text message, one message was actually legit but I wasn’t near a PC and three of the messages seemed to arrive late when no Wii were available.
Wiitracker.com – A pretty good service that monitors one of the largest lists of Wii bundles and options I’ve seen. The best way to use this is to subscribe to the RSS feed and just have it check every couple of minutes. At the bottom of the screen they offer a full history of all the times and dates various Wii bundles have been available. This is somewhat useful in that you can see that many less expensive bundles sell out in about five minutes and you can sometimes see some patterns in when certain vendors offer Nintendo Wiis.
RefreshThing.com – This is a small service that I used successfully last year to snag my own Nintendo Wii from Circuit City and help several people in my office do the same. This page updates automatically every 30 seconds, so the idea is you just keep it up in the background and keep and eye on it. The page only lists 17 Wii Bundles for sale and counts some strange places like JC Penney and eBay as valid sites to get a Nintendo Wii. It often gives false positives and it uselessly tags Amazon.com as having available Wiis all the time because you can buy one for $400. Really, when people are using a service to track down a Nintendo Wii they aren’t looking to pay $400+ for a $250 item.
OuttaStock.com Wii Finder – If you’re going to use only one online service, you might want to consider this one. They have a fair number of Wii Bundles and they never seem to give a false positive on their site. The nice thing about this service is they offer a Widget you can install and just leave up on your PC all day, checking for Wii availability. Yes, there is a Mac and a Windows Version (which uses Yahoo Widgets). When a Wii is available you click on the widget, which takes you to the site which lists availability. Click on that link and you’re set. This has been a pretty good site this year. I’ve seen a Wii available about five times now and each time it’s been dead on. Yes, sometimes they are expensive bundles, but I even caught it at the very tail end of an Amazon availability once, though I was too late to complete my order.
The season is still young, so I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to get a Wii. Like I mentioned, there are patterns to when certain sites seem to offer Nintendo Wiis. Based on these patterns I will tell you that you might want to pay attention to Amazon.com right around noon central time.
Good luck, never buy from Buy.com and happy Wii Hunting!
No Comments » | Email Link
Okay, now Buy.com is really making “The List.”
This morning I ranted about Buy.com selling me a Nintendo Wii package and then unexpectedly saying the order was suspiciously on “backorder” two days after the order was placed and confirmed. I suspect Buy.com was tricking customers into placing Wii orders for game systems they never had.
Tonight I logged onto Buy.com and found that they have my order status as “Canceled” with no explanation, no email to me and no customer service number to call. So I sent them an email over a half hour ago requesting the Buy.com customer service phone number (as they politely told me I could request). Their customer service site says I should receive an automated reply from Buy.com in a matter of about 5 minutes. Surprise! Thirty minutes later and I’m still sitting here waiting for an automated response. And while Buy.com failed to give me the number, Google’s magic did not. It is 1-800-800-0800. I’ve been on hold for about an hour now.
At about the same time I found that my Buy.com order was canceled, I found that Buy.com was offering yet another and much more expensive Wii bundle for sale this evening. Here, then is the question of the day:
So how can my Nintendo Wii order from Tuesday be on backorder and/or canceled, but Buy.com still has enough inventory to offer more Nintendo Wiis for sale on Thursday night?
I don’t know the answer. I know that I ordered a Nintendo Wii bundle for about $440. I know my order was canceled with no explanation and I know that I was then given the opportunity to spend $628 if I wish to buy a similar item.
Thanks, Buy.com.
I take comfort in the fact that I’m not the only one who hates Buy.com.
Back to the great Wii Hunt of 2007…
1 Comment » | Email Link
