So, Christmas shopping is ramping up, and there's a whole lotta' beatin' down that needs to be goin' on. Case in point, yesterday wifey, boy and I were in line at the local Sports Authority store. They were having a sale, and a woman in front of us was buying a bunch of snowboarding gear for her son. As they were about to leave, she noticed the boot bindings were charged not at the sale price. Fortunately this was at the service counter which was doubling as a checkout due to the number of people making purchases. The guy checking out the woman was the on-duty manager, so everything possible was there for a smooth and fast rectifying of the overcharge. Except, of course, the woman was about as dumb as a drunken serviceman on leave in Ho Chi Minh City in 1974. The manager explained that it would be faster for her and everyone else if they would just void the entire transaction, for which her credit card would get a credit, then they would run everything through again and he would get the correct prices in. The woman would have a charge on her card, then a credit that would zero that one out, then the new charge. None of this would "take" in this woman's walnut sized brain. She kept insisting she needed a credit, which the manager had explained a couple of times she would get, thus taking up our time for no good reason. She had several receipts, and the manager did a fine job of explaining everything, even giving her his name to write down if there were any problems after the fact. I gotta say, there needs to be more qualification for the people who get credit cards--I think it's why we intelligent people all pay so much on our rates and when we have a duh-duh moment and don't pay on time. The credit card companies are issuing these things to people so mentally incapacitated they are bound to make money--it's a tax on the stupid! The woman needed a quick knock to the back of the head (wow, look, a snowboard, how appropriate, and useful!) to see if that would jar anything into motion so I could get my purchase done and the heck out of there.