Alarm and Pause for Pre-Holiday Buying Thought

Caveat for the reader: There's no dramatic pay-off to the following piece.

   I have a 15% digital coupon that expires tomorrow, so I hit the particular store late in the day today, looking to see what I could see and mop up some odds and ends to get me closer to rounding out my holiday gift list for the year.

   Hitting some of the requisite hesitation and hints of haunts buyer's remorse at picking up things I might soon question why I'd spent the money and was intent on burdening someone else with, I was moving past that. I was finding some items to make into useful assortments of comforts and indulgences.

   Then, something tripped the store's alarm system.

    It's the same set-up we have at the lab and for our office building in general. Strobes, accompanied by two or three second pulses shrill, piercing, synthetic pea-whistle sound. Annoying, but as the store has so much more space, and a dramatically higher ceiling that we have in the lab, it wasn't the auditory attack we experience when they go off at work.

    Every time I've ever been subjected to them it's always turned out to be a faulty sensor tripping the system, so my reaction was a mix of mild amusement and the hope that someone would look to see there was nothing burning, and would then punch in the cancel code. It was a bored, but stupid presumption on my part, and in hindsight reminds me that I've been out of working in anything resembling a retail environment for over three decades.

    So, of course, the management was required to get us to all abandon our shopping and leave the building.

   While I may be an atheist - I continue to see no convincing signs of a Supreme Being and a meaningful cosmic plan, and were I to be forced to go with the belief in one in light of what I DO see I'd probably be in near-constant terror, numbing myself chemically at every opportunity - I am more than open to a sort of gestalt consciousness to the universe. I've no doubt there are many more things connecting us and events across space and time than we've developed the technology to directly detect, track and quantify. I believe in unseen forces at work, or maybe just play.

   Back to the mundane meatiness of the here and now: So, I left my cart behind and headed home, intent on using the opportunity to mentally run through the gift choices I was in the process of making.
   When I head back out tomorrow for a planned, broader array of errands (which will now include what I didn't get to do out there today) I hope to be a little wiser and sure of selection than I was today. One way or another, even with part of it still seeing me watching for packages over the following week or so, by this time eight days from now I intend to have my holiday gift shopping completed.

   As for today, I much more to do here at home in the meantime than I have the time and energy for anyway.
                                                   -Mike