I didn’t go to bed Thursday evening so I could get my one Black Friday item: a 10.1″ netbook OfficeMax was selling for $179.99 which is about $130 off.   I arrived at the store at 6 AM, saw they didn’t open until 7 and went home to prepare a sprawling breakfast and returned at quarter of 7.  There were about 20 housewives, retirees, and work-at-homers tooling around outside in an orderly line and with store circulars in hand.  A few minutes before the doors opened a store attendant wearing dark glasses carrying a clip board walked out and recited the following:

May I have your attention please.  The doors will open in four minutes and at that time you will enter the store in an orderly fashion.  Some items are available in limited quantities and these have been marked with a short stack of red tags.  Without shoving, take one tag to the service counter to retrieve your item.  There are store attendants stationed throughout the facility as monitors.  Please be civil.

The doors opened and the anticipated collapse of Western civilization did not occur but roughly 1/2 of us made a bee line to the computers so we could be told that the circular containing the netbook was faked.  One woman asked “how do you fake a circular?” to which a bleary-eye’d attendant responded “It’s just a mystery”.