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You are all a lost generation.
--Gertrude Stein

When Gertrude said that, she was talking about a group of modernist writers that had gathered in Paris after World War I. I'm talking about corporate dinosaurs. Why? Because, in the corporate world, the meteorite has just about slammed into the Yucatan peninsula, and the time of the dinosaurs is just about at an end.

At least, I really fucking hope it is.

I'll explain. This weekend, my lovely wife and I went out to a department store to get some friends a wedding present. The friends are registered at this department store, which was the only reason we were going there. The department store is not located at a convenient place and the mall that it's in is an absolute ghost town of a mall. Now, the friends didn't know this. Not their fault.

So, we're in this department store, and while I'm not going to say which one it was, it rhymes with BEERS, which is what I think the staff had been having while no one was looking, because Christ were they completely helpless.

The friends that are getting married live in my home state of Illinois. And they had included a delivery address on their little registry form. We thought this was a grand idea, and decided we'd have whatever we got for them shipped to their house, so their relatives didn't have to figure out how to lug the presents home on the plane in their allowed three pieces of luggage. What can I say, we're just nice that way.

But, the rhymes-with-BEERS place doesn't have what we want to get them in stock. No problem, we figure, we'll just ask them to have it shipped from their warehouse. Right? This should be easier, right?

We go to the saleslady, and show her what we want to get, and ask her if they can please ship it to this address. "I'm sorry." She says, "We can't do that." Both Liz and I make the kindly assumption that we've run into a new employee, who just doesn't know how to fill out the paperwork or something, and we politely ask her to check on that please. And she does. She talks to about four different people on the phone. And when she's done, she hangs up the phone, stares at us with completely dead eyes, and says, "I'm sorry. We can't do that."

So we leave that section. I think Liz and I both were just concerned that with that much pure raw stupid being emitted by that person, we should get clear of the area as soon as we could. So we go down to the bottom floor of rhymes-with-BEERS, to see if we can find the main present we're looking for. This is when I get a brainstorm.

"A catalog!" I nearly shout! All we had to do was get a catalog, or even just a phone number and we could place the order over the phone (the registry printout had stock numbers on it), and surely they'd ship it for us!

We find another saleslady. We ask her where we can get a catalog. "I'm sorry." She says. "We don't have a catalog anymore."

A little voice speaks up in the back of my head, and it suggests that we should get out of here before I get a brain embolism or something, but Liz and I are quite determined, and the saleslady does ask how she can help us, so we explain the whole deal to her. Wedding present. Couple lives in Illinois. Ship to them. She gets the same stupid cow-eyes look on her face and says, "I'm sorry. We can't do that."

I nearly grab a vacuum cleaner from a nearby display and try to ram it down the woman's throat.. The lady asks us what we want to get. We tell her. She gets on her phone. She talks to about four people, and when she finally hangs up, tells us we should go to this part of their store, and they can help us there.

Liz and I start off, and we're both fairly steamed. But, I get another brainstorm. I grab Liz's arm, take a few deep breaths so I don't start incoherently screaming obscenities when I start talking, and say, "Don't worry. I know what we'll do. Let's go home, take the registry print out with us, and we'll buy it over the Internet."

Now, this is actually fairly plausible. When Liz and I registered at JC Penney's for our wedding, they had all sorts of stuff you could do from their website. Liz bookmarked the page that had our registry on it, so she could see when stuff got checked off the registry as being purchased. It was pretty cool.

You know what rhymes-with-BEERS sells on their website? Two things, as far as I can tell. Their brand of tools, and lawnmowers. That's it. They've got placeholder pages where eventually, you might be able to think about buying other things. Eventually. But right now it's just a little graphic that tells you what section of their website you're in. There isn't even any text to tell you that eventually you'll be able to buy something there. I inferred that, because it seemed REALLY FUCKING STUPID otherwise, to just have a plain page called "Housewares" and not a god damned houseware in sight.

By now, I'm so steamed that I have to share my vitriol with someone else. So I find the feedback part of their website, and go to type out a complaint. The feedback form is not designed to encourage feedback. Not only do I have to give my home address and email address, but I have to give day and nighttime telephone numbers, on the theory that rhymes-with-BEERS is going to have a representative call me back.

The text entry area on the web page is also the approximate size of two postage stamps. Not the jumbo collectors stamps, either. Regular first-class stamps. I opened WordPerfect so I could see more then the last four words I'd typed.

But anyway, the death of the dinosaurs. Rhymes-with-BEERS is the dinosaur. The Internet is the meteorite. There's no good excuse why I couldn't have bought something from rhymes-with-BEERS over the Internet. None. And as the Internet gets more and more pervasive, more and more sales are going to be made through it. And the dinosaurs, not able to adapt to the change, are going to die off.

Good riddance.