There Is No Escape

My plans for yesterday all revolved around not having to deal with children going around begging for candy.
In this regard, my plans were an utter failure.
At 3:00 employees brought their kids in to work and went around from floor to floor hitting up people for candy.
I had no idea that this was going to happen, so I had no candy to give out.
No one actually hit me up for any, but as one group went past my cube, I heard this little girl say, in a voice dripping with contempt, “No candy here.”
Snot-nosed little – I wanted to respond with, “Well how the hell was I supposed to know? This is a place of business, not a damn candy store!”
Admittedly, a candy store is also a place of business, but that’s not the line of business I work in, and is hardly the point.
Of course I didn’t say that, but I did clear the hell out of there as soon as my boss said I could take off early if I wanted, and given the child infestation, I very much did.
After I got home I sat around for a while doing the usual. I had decided to see Zack and Miri Make a Porno (more on that in a separate post) as my means of avoiding the candy-seeking horde that, unlike the one at work, I knew was coming. Not taking any chances, I left before it started to get dark, even though the movie wouldn’t start for another two hours.
Despite the fact that I had zero interest in looking into the precious little faces of the ravening horde, I had no intention of screwing them out of their full sugar fix, so I set out a bowl of candy before I left (more on that in a bit).
After 36 years spent doing so quite frequently, I’m accustomed to being wrong about things, and in fact I usually anticipate that such will be the case, but I wasn’t prepared for being wrong about so many things.
In the first place, I thought that it would take me anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes to get to the Brambleton Town Center, where the theater is located. It took me 10 minutes.
I had intended to kill the time – not counting the time I saved in getting there – by first going to the AT&T store and seeing if they were selling the Fuze, which is the AT&T-branded version of the HTC Touch Pro, the sexy new cell phone that I intend to buy, and then getting something to eat.
The only problem with this plan was that there is no AT&T store there.
This was infuriating for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that I know there used to be one there. Evidently it has since closed. Stupid economy.
I know that there was one there because I distinctly recall commenting to Scott one time when we went to see a movie there that it was funny that I could barely get service on my AT&T phone there, given the presence of an AT&T store.
And of course, my timing was such that I was there for the peak of activity in the trick-or-treating that was going on in the Town Center, so I found myself once again failing to avoid kids in costumes going around looking for candy.
I wandered around for a while, dodging miniature Spider-Men, Hulks, pirates, genies, princesses, and so forth, then decided to try out the Thai place for dinner. I figured it would be busy and that it would take a fair amount of time.
Wrong again.
For a while I was the only patron, and the whole affair took about 20 minutes from start to finish.
As an aside, I had the “Drunken Noodle,” which, despite sounding like a less risqué term for “Whiskey Dick,” was actually very good (and very spicy).
After that I wandered around aimlessly some more – at least the kids were gone by this point – and, as it was surprisingly warm out, considering how cool the day had started out, I decided I’d drop my jacket off in my car.
This was, of course, a mistake, as it began to cool rapidly. At least walking back to my car to get my jacket ate up some time.
Eventually it was time for the movie, and finally, for the first time of the evening, I was right about something: the theater wasn’t terribly busy. I had assumed it wouldn’t be, given that most people were probably out at parties or taking their kids from door to door in a quest for sugar.
So score one for Jon.
When I got home I found that all of the candy was gone…along with the bowl.
I had assumed that someone would come along and take it, which is why I bought a cheap bowl specifically for that purpose rather than using one of my good bowls, but this was something that I had hoped I’d be wrong about. I can only hope that it happened late in the evening, and that some less greedy kids actually got to have some of the candy.
I noticed later that the empty bowl was actually left on one of the big rocks in the cul-de-sac, so I was at least wrong about someone keeping the bowl.
And that was my Halloween.
I did kinda-sorta dress up for the day. I went in to work wearing jeans, a black T-shirt, and my biker jacket, and if anyone had asked – though no one did – I would have said that I was in costume as “Myself, ten years ago.”
Of course, the costume was slightly inaccurate, in that I wasn’t wearing glasses and I wasn’t hungover.