"G'mornin', Sam." "Mornin', Ralph."
I'm deep in production on a new book, which means that my sleep schedule is completely screwed up. Sunday night, I woke up at 11 PM after a six hour nap.
By 6 AM, I knew that I hadn't the slightest inclination to fall asleep. Which meant that contrary to plans, it was actually quite possible for me to go to the annual You-Do-It Electronics Presidents' Day Sale.
The Sale is a minor legend among New England geeks. YDI is to Radio Shack what Roger Daltrey is to Clay Aiken. It's the good electronics store, the dangerous one. It's the store for folks who know from personal experience that each integrated circuit contains a cubic centimeter of Magical Blue Smoke that makes it run, and that the moment this Magic Smoke is released, it stops working.
You-Do-It can't sell you replacement Magical Blue Smoke, but they'll sell you a replacement part. In high school I used to make regular You-Do-It runs to buy 74LS ICs by the half-dozen. Whenever a floppy drive at school broke down, it invariably turned out that one of those chips had released its blue smoke.
My ability to fix these $400 drives for about $1.25 endeared me even further to the school faculty, which was probably not a good thing. I was already getting away with a lot of stuff and it only made me bolder. :)
Any part you need, any tool you need, any sort of networking, radio, or power whatsit you need...they have it. On the top floor, they sell all sorts of home, car, portable, and professional A/V toys. In a nutshell, You-Do-It in Needham is in the GPS database of anybody who was likely to own a GPS receiver in 1990.
The Sale (which dates back to the Seventies, I think) is the stuff of legend for two reasons. Way way way before Sears and Best Buy stole the idea for their after-Thanksgiving sales, YDI instituted the idea of the Earlybird Special. You know, certain advertised items that they have only a few copies of, advertised at (ideally) insanely-low prices to bring people in.
The nature of the Specials tends to vary and there are usually five or six different attractions of varying intensity. If you get there late (say, close to 8 AM, when the store opens) you could get a 19" color TV (tube) for a decent but not unbeatable price. One year, the reward for being one of the first two in line was 50% off your entire purchase of any store merchandise, with the total discount maxed at a very sensible $1000.
Yes, that year I got to the parking lot at 10:30 PM and was first in line. I beat #2 by just 45 minutes. This is how an impoverished freelancer replaced his busted TV not with a cheap 20" Goldstar, but a $1000 Sony bigscreen.
The other attraction is a room full of salvaged merchandise ranging from high-end audio equipment all the way down to bags of resistors and capacitors, all at "please, just take it off our hands" prices. Seriously, shiny audio-video gear that normally sells for $500-$1000 is stickered at a flat $25 or so. No box, no manual, not even a solid promise that it works. But crimeny, at those prices you can buy two or three and trust to the law of averages.
In addition to civilians, the Sale also attracts a regular army of entrepreneurs and sharps, who swarm through the room to scoop up merchandise that they can fix up and sell online or at flea markets and such. Some of them throw elbows as though their next month's rent depended on it.
I actually haven't attended the sale in years...maybe not even at any time in the 21st century. For one thing, unless you get there early enough to be one of the first ten in line (4 AM...though 3 would be better and 1 is optimal) there's a law of diminishing returns in effect.
Plus, it's sort of a young man's game, I realized. After x years of dutiful attendance, I lacked the eye of the tiger. Or at least I lacked the desire to shove a retiree over a stairway railing to get my hands on a $20 laserdisc player (back in the days when, I should say, a Laserdisc player cost $600, and a very neat thing to have).
I seem to remember that in my last year or the year before, I was near the head of the lie of people waiting for the doors to be thrown open and for the race to the Surplus Room to begin, and there were a bunch of people behind me that were so twitchy and sketchy that I chose to step aside and let the pack pass me by. Chalk it up to maturity. Also to the fact that I can now afford to buy my home electronics at prices that don't require hand-to-hand combat.
YDI still sends me the sale flier every year, and I always examine the earlybird specials with interest. All that it'd take is a $50 20" LCD TV to get me back in that parking lot. But like every flier in recent years, I didn't spot anything so dramatic in this year's ad that I felt particularly motivated to make the trip.
But again, it was 6 AM and I was awake. I knew that I'd be up for another eight hours at least. I was a bit nostalgic for the Sale...and I had a bitchin' SLR to take pictures with. I imagined that I'd arrive way too late to be anywhere near the head of the line, but I could still come home with some great shots.
And so I closed my eyes, commended my soul to God, and left the sanctity of central heating and cable TV for a dark 15 degree parking lot.
"G'mornin', Sam." "Mornin', Ralph."
I'm deep in production on a new book, which means that my sleep schedule is completely screwed up. Sunday night, I woke up at 11 PM after a six hour nap.
By 6 AM, I knew that I hadn't the slightest inclination to fall asleep. Which meant that contrary to plans, it was actually quite possible for me to go to the annual You-Do-It Electronics Presidents' Day Sale.
The Sale is a minor legend among New England geeks. YDI is to Radio Shack what Roger Daltrey is to Clay Aiken. It's the good electronics store, the dangerous one. It's the store for folks who know from personal experience that each integrated circuit contains a cubic centimeter of Magical Blue Smoke that makes it run, and that the moment this Magic Smoke is released, it stops working.
You-Do-It can't sell you replacement Magical Blue Smoke, but they'll sell you a replacement part. In high school I used to make regular You-Do-It runs to buy 74LS ICs by the half-dozen. Whenever a floppy drive at school broke down, it invariably turned out that one of those chips had released its blue smoke.
My ability to fix these $400 drives for about $1.25 endeared me even further to the school faculty, which was probably not a good thing. I was already getting away with a lot of stuff and it only made me bolder. :)
Any part you need, any tool you need, any sort of networking, radio, or power whatsit you need...they have it. On the top floor, they sell all sorts of home, car, portable, and professional A/V toys. In a nutshell, You-Do-It in Needham is in the GPS database of anybody who was likely to own a GPS receiver in 1990.
The Sale (which dates back to the Seventies, I think) is the stuff of legend for two reasons. Way way way before Sears and Best Buy stole the idea for their after-Thanksgiving sales, YDI instituted the idea of the Earlybird Special. You know, certain advertised items that they have only a few copies of, advertised at (ideally) insanely-low prices to bring people in.
The nature of the Specials tends to vary and there are usually five or six different attractions of varying intensity. If you get there late (say, close to 8 AM, when the store opens) you could get a 19" color TV (tube) for a decent but not unbeatable price. One year, the reward for being one of the first two in line was 50% off your entire purchase of any store merchandise, with the total discount maxed at a very sensible $1000.
Yes, that year I got to the parking lot at 10:30 PM and was first in line. I beat #2 by just 45 minutes. This is how an impoverished freelancer replaced his busted TV not with a cheap 20" Goldstar, but a $1000 Sony bigscreen.
The other attraction is a room full of salvaged merchandise ranging from high-end audio equipment all the way down to bags of resistors and capacitors, all at "please, just take it off our hands" prices. Seriously, shiny audio-video gear that normally sells for $500-$1000 is stickered at a flat $25 or so. No box, no manual, not even a solid promise that it works. But crimeny, at those prices you can buy two or three and trust to the law of averages.
In addition to civilians, the Sale also attracts a regular army of entrepreneurs and sharps, who swarm through the room to scoop up merchandise that they can fix up and sell online or at flea markets and such. Some of them throw elbows as though their next month's rent depended on it.
I actually haven't attended the sale in years...maybe not even at any time in the 21st century. For one thing, unless you get there early enough to be one of the first ten in line (4 AM...though 3 would be better and 1 is optimal) there's a law of diminishing returns in effect.
Plus, it's sort of a young man's game, I realized. After x years of dutiful attendance, I lacked the eye of the tiger. Or at least I lacked the desire to shove a retiree over a stairway railing to get my hands on a $20 laserdisc player (back in the days when, I should say, a Laserdisc player cost $600, and a very neat thing to have).
I seem to remember that in my last year or the year before, I was near the head of the lie of people waiting for the doors to be thrown open and for the race to the Surplus Room to begin, and there were a bunch of people behind me that were so twitchy and sketchy that I chose to step aside and let the pack pass me by. Chalk it up to maturity. Also to the fact that I can now afford to buy my home electronics at prices that don't require hand-to-hand combat.
YDI still sends me the sale flier every year, and I always examine the earlybird specials with interest. All that it'd take is a $50 20" LCD TV to get me back in that parking lot. But like every flier in recent years, I didn't spot anything so dramatic in this year's ad that I felt particularly motivated to make the trip.
But again, it was 6 AM and I was awake. I knew that I'd be up for another eight hours at least. I was a bit nostalgic for the Sale...and I had a bitchin' SLR to take pictures with. I imagined that I'd arrive way too late to be anywhere near the head of the line, but I could still come home with some great shots.
And so I closed my eyes, commended my soul to God, and left the sanctity of central heating and cable TV for a dark 15 degree parking lot.