Random Monday Anecdote?

Things at work are annoying, and I may post more about that a little later today (I have a meeting about the ongoing annoyance in about half an hour). I came into work on Friday but was specifically annoyed at the fact that it was a meaningless gesture, because very few other people came in (day between the holiday and the weekend and all that), and so the people I am (still) waiting to get stuff from were nowhere to be found, and I twiddled my thumbs for eight hours. I had plenty of time to blog, but wasn’t particularly in the mood.

In any case, that means I owe you guys a random anecdote, and now that the weekend has come and gone I have one I really do want to share. It’s minor-to-the-point-of-triviality, but that’s kind of my specialty, no?

On Saturday I took the kids to Costco while my wife was at work. They were all very well-behaved so it was a relatively painless excursion, and then at the checkout lane the universe delivered me a nice little geek-chuckle. As my purchases were being scanned, I could see a couple of lanes over another gentleman checking out. He was probably older than me, based on the fact that his salt-and-pepper vandyke was more salt than pepper. He was wearing this t-shirt:

If you are having a hard time discerning what that is supposed to be, it’s the torso of one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Michelangelo, in point of fact) which puts it somewhere between geek proud fashion statement and full-on cosplay. For the record, when I was a kid I always preferred the Underoos designs which were more costume-like, e.g. the t-shirt that looked like the chestplates of Boba Fett’s armor, not a full-body picture of the bounty hunter himself. So props for that.

But that’s not what made the sighting note- and/or chuckle-worthy. Because guess what this gentleman was buying. It wasn’t a massive pallet of supplies or anything, but a much humbler in-and-out transaction. He was, as it happened, buying two gigantically Costco-sized pre-prepared pepperoni pizzas. And honestly, if I woke up in the morning and was thinking about getting dressed to go out and buy comically oversized pizzas and was trying to figure out which t-shirt to wear, and I owned a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirt, I believe that would be as no-brainer as it gets. It just makes me smile knowing there are other people like that out there in the world.