The Finite

With single-minded determination for several weeks now, I have decided that a new laptop shall be mine before this is all over. I’d like a laptop that doesn’t slow down when I enable javascript. My requirements are a Core 2 Duo processor at least and a >15 inch screen.

The plan for a week now has been to take advantage of a Best Buy doorbuster. A $399 Toshiba L505-5S984. (Yes, I memorized the model number.) Sales start thanksgiving day on bestbuy.com and I was there at 3AM Wednesday night. Miserly, I waited while some pencil pusher somewhere was rapidly updating pricing and availability information for bestbuy.com’s listings. I finally fell asleep around 3:30 to be woken up at 9:00AM by a “SOLD OUT ONLINE” placard where the “Add to cart” should have been. I cursed the tubes, the best buy executives and the internet gods before I started frantically looking for a deal that was in stock. (SPLURGE!)

Enter a $549 Toshiba L505-5S990. I immediately ordered before I even left my room. I go downstairs to read the paper and open up a two-page spread in the Fry’s ad for a $479 MSI A6000-030US. Basically, the same specs, but it has a Blu-ray drive. I don’t really need one, but my inner materialist is drooling on himself.

It is worth mentioning how fortuitous it is, that a camp-out at Fry’s has been planned for a week now. I had just been planning to grab rebated minor items as I was unaware of the laptop doorbuster, but oh, what blessed happenstance!

The cold, I expected; a cold, not so much. I was still Capt Phlegmbucket by the time we set up the tent. And my headache returned whenever I punched myself in the head, which is unusual and slightly distressing.

The cast this year, included Kurt, Junyong and myself. Same old tent, same spot in line. Difference being that Junyong is here to buy a new laptop hard drive so we can’t watch another Judd Apatow comedy. So we played Risk. I ended up with Oceania, the Southeast US, and East and South Asia; making sure all were places whose accents I could do. Because trash-talking in an Indian accent is fun. Try it. I couldn’t stop once I started.

Junyong meanwhile continues to show a incorrigible need to defeat me at whatever we do and tried to hustle us into believing he wasn’t good at Risk. He would not rest while I controlled Australia, even after losing 5 men to my one who kept quipping things in an Australian accent like “Thanks for standing still, wanker!” and “I’m not a crazed gunman, I’m a sniper!”

After I was pincered, Kurt and Junyong rolled it out until the reluctant Korean was the only one left on the board. By then it was closer to 4AM and we rolled up the tent after a brief session of Apples to Apples.

And so it begins. The line compresses toward the door. The dead hoboes and motionless blanket heaps come alive as the employees handed out entry tickets. Junyong’s prepared his shurikens for any line-jumpers and the interminable last half-hour began. I tried to Pai Mei my way through what I thought was a particularly weak spot of brick but was unsuccessful.

The doors open at 4:54AM. I head in and immediately head for the far right corner of the store, where I know the laptops are. Lo and behold: another line. Fifteen minutes later, I emerge with a print out form with my name on it. I rush to pick up whatever else I can get, which turns out to just a wireless keyboard/mouse, and a power strip. The free-after-rebate 2GB flash drive turned out to be impossible to find. And so I come away with it, one laptop richer and a half-grand poorer. And with a newly-worsened cold that is just raping me.

If the economy is not kick-started, I’ll be seriously pissed off.

My training continues. There’s a bunch of stuff the higher-ups get to do. Beyond fetching ice cream from the bunker, there’s chopping watermelon, and conjuring buffalo sauce.

We hadn’t always sold watermelon slices, but when we started to, there appeared in the knife drawer a large curving knife with sweeping blade as long as my arm. It’s a little scary. I freaked out Tara when she rounded a corner and saw me 20 feet away holding up what was essentially a machete as I prepared to ask where the watermelons were kept.

After many sectoral prismatoids, I realized that a machete does not, a warrior, make.

When I say “conjuring buffalo sauce”, I don’t mean a large cauldron stirred by heretical manifestations of misogyny. It’s simply a two-foot wide heated steel pot stirred by a three-foot long whisk and filled with an always fuming, occasionally bubbling, opaque suspension. It clears the sinuses of anyone nearby and is also delicious depending on who you ask and whether they’re Korean.

Fryers does not command the same glory and respect that it does in a fast food franchise. Sure, there’s the majestic feeling of lifting 3 lbs of popcorn chicken out of a searing vat of delicious hydrocarbons, but many people are unaware of the backstage maintenance that must be performed to ensure that the show goes on.

The oil at the end of a night is occupied by a lot of spare foodstuffs floating beneath the baskets:fry fragments, breading particles. Fact of life. Thus, the oil is extracted, filtered and returned. This is done with what is essentially a big scary, occasionally burning hot, metal coffeemaker. Oil is drawn down a tube through a stainless steel mesh then, into a paper filter, then pumped through a rubber hose and back into the fryer vat, all these components becoming obscenity-inducing-ly hot.

The fryer filter is like a hippogriff. You will not tame the fryer filter unless you first earn its respect and you will not earn its respect if you show it fear. Conquer your fear and you will conquer the fryer filter. According to DJ.

But that’s just one skill. I have many more to learn.

Also, cleaning the soda machine is sort of like Quidditch. Sort of.

It may not surprise some of my Purdue readers but there has been a zombie outbreak on campus. A moderately severe one. This outdoor-only infection started here. There are still survivors as far as I know.

They’re the ones armed with Nerf blasters. The standard load out is with the N-Strike 6-shot Maverick Rev-6 single-action revolver, which are conveniently located in full view of shopping college students at Walmart since August.

However, for those of them who couldn’t get their blasters rush delivered in time, the rules also stipulate that a balled up sock can serve the same purpose, thrown at zombies, it can also stun them for a spell. (And no, Nerf footballs are not like pipebombs.)

Resistance fighters cover doors between classes. Tuesday, a little Chinese girl with an orange armband waved me into Recitation Hall, with a Nerf Recon CS-6 slung over her shoulder; its stock extended and 6-round magazines jungle-clipped with masking tape and Hello Kitty stickers. On my way to class, I saw a three-man patrol, their squad gunner was hauling on his hip a fully automatic, chain-fed Vulcan EBF-25.

On Wednesday night, an army of two stopped by the Grille looking for food. They each had holsters made out of duct tape and cardboard on their hips for their Mavericks. In addition, each carried a pump-action Raider CS-35 with shoulder straps made out of duct tape. On a bandoleer around each of them was attached many spare darts to refill the Raider’s 35-round drum magazine. Hanging from one’s back was a lever-action Buzz Bee Rapid Fire. Attached to the bandoleer by velcro like so many fuzzy white grenades, were their socks, a desperate last resort for when all their other weapons were depleted.

You see, there are missions to accomplish when the sun falls. The survivors attempt desperately to gather the components of a cure. But the dead mostly come out at night, mostly. I could see them from the library window. A mob of survivors retreating desperately from an even larger zombie swarm. Tactical lights bolted to guns flashed everywhere trying to illuminate the path ahead and flush out any zombies in ambush. I sullenly went back to my biochemistry as suction cup rounds bounced off the window.

The extraction mission is today, and the “military” (Ball State students with what I hear are swords) is pulling out and taking all the remaining survivors with them.

I am proud that the honor system finally works. Although, gone is the tranquility of the night. What’s worse than zombies? Drunk, disoriented zombies. This neighborhood used to be a lot nicer when there were just drunk college students staggering around.