Stupid sale, I mean super sale...

So on Friday, over dinner at Field's, I had the following conversation with coworker and former housemate bsom:

bsom: So, our old landlord saw an ad on TV for a Supersale at the Timonium fairgrounds and wants to go tomorrow in the hopes of scoring a cheap laptop.

mad anthony: Doesn't he realize that it's all a scam? That it's like store returns and stuff that fell off the back of a trash truck?

bsom: I told him that. He wouldn't listen. So wanna go?


So, the next day, fortified by a Chick-fil-a chicken biscuit, we trecked to the fairgrounds. I knew that there wouldn't be any $199 laptops, and if there were they would be worth about fidy cent. But I figured it would be entertaining, like watching a car accident. And, aside from a paper for my night MBA class that was due Monday and hadn't been started, I didn't have anything else to do. And I was planning on going to CMART that day anyway, and bsom was interested since one of their buyouts was of a gourmet supermarket, and "stuff in jars is often tasty". (My main reason for going was that they had bought out the inventory of a cigar shop that got hit by an ambulance).

So the super sale was everything I expected, and less. The cheapest laptop they had was $399. It was an old IBM P3 with a 60 gig hard drive but (i think) only 64mb RAM. And it was running Windows ME. And it didn't have a network card. And the price didn't include the power adapter or an optical drive. Other interesting things that the computer vendor had included a rack of 5-year old IBM flat panels (the white ones with the huge bezel) for $69. We had a couple here at work, all of which have died, and the picture quality was horrible - and you can often find 15" flat panels on sale for $99 or less NEW. They also had a bunch of Vizeo LCD TV's - all of which had "guarenteed no bright pixels" crossed out on the box - which suggests they probably were all returned with bright pixels.

There was only one vendor selling computer stuff. The rest was pretty much a giant flea market - bootleg (i assume) sneakers at prices that were higher than the real thing, fake designer purses, fake cologne, car wax and floor cleaner with impressive demonstrations, "tobacco pipes", cheap knives, cheaper toys, bootleg mixtape cd's, and 1500 watt car amps.

The worst part about it was that they charge you $7 to get in. It did make me feel pretty good about my deal hunting though, considering how much people were paying for total crap there when I knew I could get better stuff way cheaper.

CMart was cool, though - I got a couple food items cheap (including something in a jar) and a couple tins of small cigars - a pack of Panters, the cigar of choice of Lileks, a pack of Nat Shermans and a tin of CAO mint ice cream and mango flavored cigars that I've been meaning to try but was too cheap to pay cigarbid/cigars international prices for. I haven't smoked much in a while, but I once it gets warmer I figure I might enjoy a cigar outside on the deck every now and again.

So that was my weekend. Although I did eventually write that paper (10 hours of procrastination and 2 hours of actual work). It's possibly the worst thing I've ever written. Which I said about my last paper for the class and I got an A, so hopefully that will happen again.