Nobody

Shopping Trip

"Yeah. Tony like it, and we played the hell out of it when we got snowed in during the winter," I told her. I thought for a second. "I played either a wizard or a ranger."

She smiled widely. "You'll love wow."

"Wow?" I asked.

"World of Warcraft, silly. You're probably end up Alliance Scum," she snickered. "Do you know what you want?"

"No clue," I was honest.

"Mind if I handle this?" She grinned. "I know a little bit about computers."

I shrugged. "Knock yourself out."

A kid dressed in slacks, a black dress shirt, and a red vest came up. "Can I help you?" he asked me.

"My friend needs a two good computer desks, chairs that will support his lower back for long periods of time, ergonomic mouse pads, a cable hub, a wireless router, a good wireless printer, eight reams of paper, a box of printer cartridges, USB cables, a USB hub, four power strips," Miss Lily-Rylee rattled off at him.

"Are you interested in getting a computer, sir?" He asked, turning to me like Miss Lily-Rylee hadn't said a single word.

A look of irritation flashed across Miss Lily-Rylee's face. "Not here. He doesn't want prebuilt junk full of proprietary hardware and malware."

The guy glared at her, but she let go of my arm to put her fists on her hips, staring up at him. "Do you have what we're looking for or not?"

He gave her another glare, but led us toward the back.

I liked the glass and chrome desks, but Miss Lily-Rylee steered me toward more traditional wooden desks. She didn't get a specialized one with a niche for the computer, telling me that the desk could only hold a "baby's computer, not a real rig" in a disdainful tone. Once I chose each thing it was loaded on a dolly and taken up front.

The sales guy obviously didn't like her attitude, because he tried to show us some computers, looking at me and extolling the virtues of the little black boxes. She waited till she was done, grabbed the printed paper on the side of them, and took one look at the specifications of the computers and she burst out laughing.

"I wouldn't run The Sims on these ancient piles of junk," she said. She shook her head. "We told you, we don't want prebuilt." She said it like a dirty word.

The guy looked at me and I shrugged and gave him my best "don't look at me" expression.

"These are perfectly new computers," he told me.

That seemed to annoy the hell out of her.

Miss Lily-Rylee grabbed my arm, pulling me after her. "Let's go, Samuel. I don't think I want to buy that stuff here after all."

For a second she reminded me of my little sister at the cattle shows.

Another sales guy, this one with more buttons on his vest, waved at us as we started to leave. I saw Miss Lily-Rylee's slight smile that she quickly banished as we moved over.

"Is there a problem, sir?" He asked me.

"Yes," Miss Lily-Rylee snapped.

The sales guy quickly smoothed it over that he'd addressed me first. "I'm sorry, ma'am, what's the problem."

"I told your sales associate that I didn't want to buy a pre-built computer full of malware and proprietary hardware, and he insisted on showing me the models you have here, most of which are two or more years out of date. When I refused to consider them, he kept looking at him, when I've been the one making the decisions," She said, fire snapping in her eyes.