Shack Attack Flashback

A couple of months ago, I got a new high-definition TiVo to go along with my high-def TV. I was going to write about it, but most of my friends have been hearing about my TiVo obsession since I got my first one in 2005, and everybody else, well, usually people just roll their eyes. Either you're already a believer, or you don't care at all. Anyway, I wanted to move the older TiVo into the other room and hook it up to the other TV. I needed some network cable, the round stuff with the connectors that look like wider phone-line thingies.

I asked the IT guy at work if he had any cable lying around, and he dropped some off at my desk later that day. I brought it home and put it somewhere, but I didn't move the TiVo right away because there was some stuff on it that we hadn't watched yet. After we did get around to watching those shows, I didn't move the TiVo right away, out of laziness more than anything else.

On Sunday I was feeling somewhat industrious, so I started doing a bunch of little things around the house that I'd been meaning to get to, and eventually I got around to moving the old TiVo. Of course, this was the point when I realized I didn't know where I'd put the network cable, which I needed to connect the TiVo box to my cable modem so it can obtain programming information via the internet. (TiVos can also do this through a phone line, but our home phone is the voice-over-IP kind, and for some reason, these two pieces of electronic gear don't always play well together.)

I spent about two hours looking for the cable. Our apartment isn't that big, and there are only so many places it could be, so I looked in those places over and over again, along with every other likely possibility. It's also ten feet long, so wherever it was, it would be fairly obvious. I did not find it, which led me to the conclusion that it may have been accidentally thrown out. I don't know if that's what really happened, but believing that's what happened makes me feel a tiny bit better about my inability to find it.

So last night we were going to Trader Joe's on Memorial Drive, and I realized that I could pick up a cable at the MicroCenter across the parking lot. I used to go there fairly frequently, but I hadn't been in the store in several years. I also knew that I could get a cable cheaper online, but the frustration of not being able to find the original made me impatient and disinclined to wait another week in order to save a few bucks.

Normally a trivial errand like this wouldn't be worthy of a post, but when I went to pay for the cable, I was confronted with the ghost of Radio Shack. Since the purchase was only a few dollars, I chose to pay in cash. See, MicroCenter likes to send you promotional flyers in the mail, just like the Shack used to a generation ago, back when they were still vaguely relevant in the consumer electronics marketplace. If you buy something with a credit card, MicroCenter gets your info from the transaction and puts you on their mailing list. If you pay cash, they ask you for your name and address, so they can put you on their mailing list.

You would think that a $10 network cable would not be considered a significant enough purchase to trigger the address request, but I can recall buying something like a $2 headphone adapter at the Shack and getting asked for my name and address, so I suppose I should not have been surprised that the MicroCenter cashier asked me. I started to give a fake name and address, almost on instinct, because it's what I used to do back in the Shack days, but then I stopped. I looked at the cashier and said, "Can we just skip this nonsense?"

I amended my question by making it clear that I understood she was just doing her job, and I wasn't trying to give her a hard time. She shrugged and took my money, so I guess they aren't too rigid about it, but it all just seems so silly. Regardless of what MicroCenter thinks, the presence of a flyer in my mailbox is not going to make me any more likely to shop there.