I have customer service on the brain these days, which is why I feel like taking a flamethrower to Best Buy. Every time I venture in, I feel as if I have appeared on Bizarro World: nothing is where it should be, nothing does what it is supposed to, nobody knows anything about anything, and nothing makes the slightest amount of sense. One wall is dedicated to customer-service awards they have bestowed upon themselves; the actual customers are queued in the mile-long returns line, grumbling about how they will never set foot in the store again. Poor Crash, visiting from New York, got snared in my revenge fantasies. Everyone says America has transformed into a service economy, but nobody in America knows anything about service. It’s an English word, and it does not mean “grunting in monosyllables about the extended warranty plan.”

Last night, we saw House of the Flying Daggers, which is a stunningly gorgeous movie starring stunningly gorgeous people. Not a frame of the film goes by that is not stunningly gorgeous. There is a stalk of bamboo that is more attractive than Matt Damon, but don’t tell him I said so because he gets awfully jealous. The Chinese are going to take over the world because they are intensely detail-oriented, they take pride in everything they do, and there are a billion of them. There are only two hundred fifty million Americans, and not one of us can figure out why we need extended warranty plans. Why are we paying stores extra to take back shoddy merchandise when it is already overpriced?

When the Chinese come for us, all they will find are two hundred fifty million dusty skellingtons propped up in the Best Buy returns line.