Na na na na, hey hey-ey, goodbye

I am suddenly and unreasonably into steampunk right now. I blame Jesse, among others, mainly for showing me this. More about steampunk some other time, or possibly never, depending on how soon I get this out of my system.

So, I went to the Apple Store because I needed a new battery. Some of you may have been to the Apple Store--in fact, so had I--but certain minor elements of the experience were nonetheless unfamiliar to me. I spotted my battery with relative ease, but found that the cash registers were somewhat harder to locate, even with the large display in the back offering a steady feed of shopping and hardware tips. So, after studying the display of designer ipod cases for a little while, I managed to mill around in the general vicinity of some other people who looked like they wanted to pay for things. Soon, the impressively-coiffed Skyler (a name that I had always assumed belonged to the realm of fiction, like Jherana or Da5id) came along with a bar-code-and-credit-card scanner to assist me. After applying the scanner to its respective scannees, he told me that they could either print the receipt or email it to me. "Email it to me," I said gamely, caught up in the slick technofuturism of the paperless, cash-registerless showroom, and gave a moment's thought to which of my email addresses would be the least unpleasant to have to recite. Looking at his scanny-gizmo, Skyler asked "emorenod at ucsd?" I feigned nonchalance at the fact that Apple had found my email address knowing only my credit card number, and made my escape, before secret cameras could determine anything about my buying patterns from my gait, eye movement, and meandering path through the store in search of cash registers and other anachronisms.