I had some free time on my hands yesterday after dropping Asha off at a birthday party held at Nickel City (an arcade-type place in a nearby mall). There were a couple of accessories that our family needed in the electronics area, so I made a rare stop at Circuit City. The items we needed were a mini-usb cable for an MP3 player we own, and one of those DVD lens cleaner thingys. These are extras that make the stuff we own work. They are also items that a person is likely to only purchase once or twice in his/her lifetime. I would assume most people are like me, and have no frame of reference for what these things would cost. Marie's guess on the DVD cleaning thingy was $4 - after all, it's just a disk with some wispy brushes shoved into its underside at strategic places. I walked into the store, and found my way to the USB cable. Price = $30. Wha--? I walked away and found the DVD lens cleaner. Price = $15. Double wha--? I can't bring myself to pay that for 2 items that were probably made for under 20 cents. It got me thinking - when a retailer prices an item, they have a few choices. First, they can give you a fantastic price and make you genuinely glad you hauled yourself into their wonderful establishment. Next, they can go for not good, not bad pricing. Also, they can go higher than that, and make sure people buy the item even if they're not crazy about the price. Lastly, they can try to sell a stupid USB cable for $30, causing them to end up in my blog where I will make snide remarks like "it's no wonder Circuit City's stock is down over 90% since the year 2000". I came home and bought a mini-USB cable on ebay from a nice fellow in Longview, WA for $6.89 (including shipping).

The Japanese have a phrase that I've always liked - "gatsu pouzu" - (literally "guts pose") it describes the feeling or appearance that accompanies the moment when a person knows he or she has won. This week, I had a rather lengthy road to a gatsu pose which I will now bore you with. My company moved locations in the fall of last year. Our new building is fine, but is roughly the size of Mall of America, and has only one "employee entrance". Every day I waste about 10 minutes (roundtrip) getting from my car to my desk. Over the space of a year, this represents roughly a total of 284 man-months of wasted time for the 1500 employees at the building. I began riding the kid's razor scooter between the car and building in protest, but soon found a better way in. On the ground floor of the building, there is a trash compactor the workers are always using, which leaves an open door. It's open in the morning, but closed at night, so I started going out an adjacent exit that you can't get in via key-card. This route takes only about a minute, so it saves a lot of time. A couple of weeks ago, all employees received an email saying that starting that day, all exits except the employee entrance would be "alarmed" to keep us safe because tiles were falling off the side of the building. All doors (including the one I used) had signs on them - "THIS DOOR IS NOW ALARMED". I was mad.

Around that same time, I became frustrated by the inability of my company to make new products. The problem is now so bad that our competitors are making us feel the pain on a routine basis. In spite of this, we continue to devolve into the gang that couldn't shoot straight. I resolved to write a letter to my superiors telling them this, and making a few dire predictions about what would happen if we get to the end of 2009 and still have a losing product. This last Friday, I ran the letter by my boss, who was supportive, and then sent it to the SVP dude who runs our business. I really didn't pull any punches - the letter was accurate but gory - the kind of thing that I may look back on in a few months and say "there are few exceptions to the "honesty is the best policy" song, but that letter was one of them". Having sent the letter late Friday afternoon, I decided to make a hasty exit, and a thought popped into my mind. Those signs on the exits are probably lying - there are really no alarms. If there was any time to test this little theory, it was then. I mean, if the man fires me for my too-honest letter, a little incident with the emergency exit really won't be that important. So I jogged down the stairs, pushed the bar to open the door, and left the building. No alarm - GATSU POUZU!