A Few Moments When I Wish I Were in Buckle-Country (Part I)

In case you haven't heard of it, "The Buckle Game" is this game that kids (ahem, for me that should say 'college students') play where your sole aim is to walk into The Buckle, walk to the back wall, touch it, and walk out, without anyone greeting you. In all honesty, if you do it without five people greeting you, it's kind of like a moral victory.

The whole thing pokes fun of the aggressiveness of salesmanship at the retailer (they sell on commission after all). Kids (college students) love it. The Buckle hates it (and I think deep down inside, loves it). Urban legend holds that when new Buckle-ers are getting trained, they are told about The Buckle Game and instructed to do their part to carry on Buckle's great name as a place of eager service. (I am not sure if anyone has told them that the people playing the Buckle Game are not complimenting them, but that is another blog post....AND, urban legends are not meant to be made to 'face the facts' so to speak. That would be an unthinkable double standard.)

Contrast that experience with the fresh waves of customer (dis)service that have been washing over me since my arrival to the prim-and-proper land.

I bought a drip coffee-maker this year because it was just too much work to use my french press every time I wanted a cup of brew last year. I mean, the thing only made a little over a cup, and it was pretty obnoxious to try to rinse out the grounds--especially since there are no garbage disposals here, so it was this very complicated straining and trashing process that almost felt like making coffee by hand (if there were such a thing. Don't question the analogy--go with it.) So, anyway, I decided to buy a drip coffee-maker. I had some beans from the United States (that I had basically had to stick in the holster of my belt loop because I was so over-packed) and I was ready to go. I bought a coffee maker for 7 GBP (which works out to about $10 and translates into DIRT CHEAP). This is the first time that the old 'you get what you pay for' adage hasn't come around to bite me in the bee-hind (Don't ask me about the 5 GBP duvet cover. Yes, it sounded too good to be true. Yes, it was. Yes, it was more like 5 gigantic kleenexes sewn together. No, it has not been keeping me warm. No, I did not learn my lesson. I thought I said not to ask about the duvet cover?!). Buying a 7 GBP coffee-maker is to my stinginess what my one good golf drive is to my golf-game. I may be completely delusional, but that one success causes me to forget about what happens 95% of the time and believe that the best is yet to come.

But the challenge for me came in finding coffee-filters to put in the coffee machine. Sure, I later discovered that the coffee machine came with a built-in personal filter. But before I knew that, I wondered why it was so hard to find coffee filters (if you could easily buy a coffee maker)? After I knew that, I still didn't care, because it was this very system of having to clean something out every time I made coffee that had inspired me to buy the coffee maker in the first place (and the permanent filter left little coffee granules in the bottom of the pot).

This is the story of trying to find coffee filters at the grocery store. If you didn't know better, you would think this wasn't going to be a very good story. But you know better....

To be continued.