"Bad for Families"

At the store on Saturday egg nog was on sale for 50 cents, and it reminded me of another time when egg nog was on sale, and how it led to me meeting Birch Miller. It was the winter in either 2000 or 2001, probably 2001, since eggnog season had ended and it had gone one sale for good. I was at the big Kroger on College Mall road with Brigid Hendricks and we were near the checkout and she said "Oh, there's my friend Birch" and she pointed to this guy who had a whole bunch of eggnog. He said it was on sale so he was stocking up. We talked for a minute, and the conversation invariably turned to the topic of the new U-Scan self checkout system. Birch said "Don't use those, they're bad for families." I said "What?" and he said "They're bad for working families."

I don't really know why, but this phrase "bad for families" really left an impression in my mind. Whenever I saw Birch after that, I had to bring up the "bad for families" thing. If he was locking up his bike outside the Secret Sailor, I said to him "Don't do that, that's bad for families." Didn't really matter what it was, I would always bring it up. After a while I got the feeling that he didn't like me. But now we are pretty good friends, and I pretty much never bring up the "bad for families" thing.

U-Scan checkouts are everywhere. I still think they're kind of annoying.

Here is a picture of Birch's burning misspelled UITS ID badge.



I have no idea why egg nog is on sale, or why it is even available yet. Next to the regular eggnog, there was some pumpkin eggnog, obviously for Halloween I guess, but I'm not sure how that would taste. Has anyone out there tried it? Is it any good? It might go on sale soon. If it went to waste that would be bad for working families.