Zappos is one of the biggest shoe stores on the web. Although I am not a shoe-aholic (my younger daughter has that gene), I do have princess-and-the-pea feet which are very hard to fit. As a result I am quite particular about how they are shod. Because I have no desire to visit shoe stores, where my feet feel discriminated against since I have to choose chunky, flat, vaguely orthopedic shoes, instead of stylish, strappy, kitten-heeled scraps of leather, I head to online shoe vendors instead. Zappos is a great destination because of the breadth of selections available to my poor, under-served feet, but, despite the variety of shoes available, I still only have about a 33% success rate in finding ones that fit. I'm sure that I'm rapidly chalking up customer-from-hell points at Zappos due to the number of my returns and will someday find that I can no longer access their website, instead being automatically redirected to one of their competitor's domains where I can wreak havoc on their reserve-for-returns line on their balance sheet. (They don't really resell returned shoes, do they?)

Today at work I was on a conference call with our CEO who had a very limited amount of time to listen to several people present a large quantity of information. At one point, when one of the presenters was rambling on in a particularly unfocused way, his boss interjected, "You really need to watch the clock, Lancelot." To which Lancelot replied, "Sure. I'll just speak louder." Which he did. For another loooooong ten minutes.

Every once in a while I get a piece of mail for one of my neighbors. Occasionally I even open these envelopes before realizing that the sausage-of-the-month club invoice isn't for me. Yesterday I received the mother-lode of mail from my neighbors - cable bill, utility bill, credit card statement, bank statement, and a few catalogs they probably don't want their kids to see. I wish I could say that this was the first thing that entered my mind:

"Hmmm, I wonder if Fred and Ethel are home so that I can return their mail to them immediately?"

But that would be a lie and lying is just wrong. Instead, the lizard part of my brain engaged and muttered in a gravelly voice:

"Hmm, I wonder how long it would take to steal Fred and Ethel's identities with this wealth of information, especially considering that Ethel and I share the same first name, and they're moving soon, and I've never really liked them anyway..."

In this epic battle of good and evil, who will win? The lizard who looks disturbingly like that fucking little GEICO gecko (that needs to be fried up to make lizard-and-chips), or the androgynous angel with the stick up its ass?

To be continued...