A few unrelated thoughts, with lots of parentheses

- Yesterday I had to return something to Walmart. I didn't have a receipt, but I wasn't going to let that stop me (though our Walmart has instituted a 3-receiptless-returns-in-a-six-month-period policy. Yeah, the name is long, but it gets their point across.) So I went and stood in line. (Has anyone seen that SNL skit about the Target Cashiers? It always runs through my mind when I am at Walmart.) They had two registers open and at the one on the left there was a squirrely looking kid and his very pregnant wife trying to return a Playstation 3. They said it was because it "didn't work". So the customer service lady opened the box, and there was no controller. That was enough to convince her. She kept saying "Yeah, it won't work without a controller. You have to have a controller." She said it to everyone. A guy (maybe it was the manager) came to look the unit over and said, "There is no Hard Drive." (And I wanted to point out to the manager that THAT was probably why it wasn't working. He might not have known.) Then he said, "The serial number is gone." To which the squirrely kid replied "That is the way it came".
Things were definitely getting good, but at this point I finished my business and had to leave. So I cannot tell you how this story ended. I can't even really guess. Walmart can be pretty surprising with their return policy sometimes. I know a guy who returned a cd that his dog had chewed on, claiming that it "didn't work". It was pretty obvious it had been attacked by a dog, but Walmart replaced it anyway.