Never buy calendars for Christmas

My random thoughts before, during and after Black Friday shopping:

• The alarm goes off. It's 8:05 a.m. Now's as good a time as any to shop, but it's not a good time to shower. These lounge pants and this T-shirt are the perfect outfit. If I need to try on clothes, there's little effort to get out of my current clothing. And when it's Black Friday shopping, nobody judges you for appearance. Hey, D'Nieka Hartsfield, here's an idea for your next column: "The Friday when fashion doesn't matter."

• I think next year I'm going to be a Black Friday assistant. I'll volunteer to stand in line after a family's purchases are done. I'll buy it all, and sell it back to them for a 10 percent upcharge. I'm pretty sure I'd have made a few hundred bucks just standing in a line.

I brought up the idea to the husband behind me who clearly did not want to be at our particular location, and he said he knew of people who make a career of little else but standing in line and buying people's tickets for them.

But it's not a foolproof plan, I'm thinking. What if they want to use their store card? No responsible clerk should accept a stranger saying, "I'm using their card to buy it for them." What if there's some type of contract? I hate my phone contract enough to know I don't want to sign on for somebody else's.

• My biggest gift-giving advice? Never buy a calendar for a gift. I told a girlfriend years ago not to buy one for Christmas - not because she didn't pick the right one, but because she wasted money when she didn't have to. Nobody has much use for a calendar on Christmas Day, and the prices are slashed on Dec. 26 - half off, then downward to February when they're $1 each. Every desk calendar I've ever purchased myself was bought in January.

• You know who hates those Black Friday slashed-price DVDs? People with OCD. All of those mismatched DVDs. Must. Be. Put. Back. Together. In alphabetical order. And by the time you've lovingly reorganized them, some jerk mixed them all back up because he found "Veep Season 1" and "Veep Season 4," but he had to search every nook and cranny for the middle two seasons.

• Has anybody used a cranny by itself? I know of people with breakfast nooks or reading nooks or even a Nook tablet. But nobody's ever told me, "Just put your coat in that cranny over there." It's like how nobody's gone through a tribulation without a trial.

• If I were to make a graph of my shopping today, it would be y = 1/x. In this chart, "y" is equal to the percent chance I'll purchase something, while "x" is equal to the number of questions the clerk asks me within the first 30 seconds of setting foot into the store.

"Hey, what's going on?" "Shopping for yourself?" Shopping for your girl?" "Shopping for your kid?" ... I'm shopping elsewhere, see ya.

• After the Black Friday shopping, I'm at work ... where's my credit card? I promise this isn't one of those lame "I'm thankful for these things" columns, but I am thankful technology now creates phone apps that let me lock the credit card up should some shady character have it.

Oh wait ... I don't have my card because it's in the lounge pants, and I changed before work. Technology sure helps, but it doesn't make me any smarter.

Kevin Wilson is managing editor for the Clovis office of The Eastern New Mexico News. Contact him at: [email protected]