Loser Activists Ruin The Shopping Experience

SAN DIEGO (TNA) – For the record, I support global warming. Parts of where I live get a little too cold in the winter. So when some wingnut with a clipboard approaches me outside of Whole Foods and asks to talk about global warming, what do we have to talk about? What’s he going to do, change my mind?

Ha! Good one.

I don’t appreciate being ambushed as I buy my Belgian beer in non-recyclable bottles. How would he feel if I hung around outside the medical marijuana dispensary and harassed him to sign my pro-waterboarding initiative?

He’d lose his high and the glaucoma would come back.

Source: Bien_Stephenson/ The_Consumerist

It's an inconvenient truth that loser activists block access to Best Buys around the country.

I would have mistaken him for a bum if he hadn’t been holding the sign-of-the-wingnut: a clipboard with dog-eared pages of paper.

I always try to take evasive action when I see the clipboard-jockey milling around the mall. This particular guy was good, though. It was like he came out of the bushes, which, come to think of it, he probably did.

As I walked the shortest distance between my car and the entrance, he approached me and asked, “Excuse me, are you a registered voter?”

Now, what’s it to him? Maybe I am, maybe-the-f*%$ I’m not. He should have asked the more important question – which camera I was going to buy – because, honestly, at that point, I had no idea. I could have used his unbiased opinion as an anti-consumerist on the fringes of society.

Instead, he hit me with a non-sequitur about my voting status. Man, what a downer. I was tempted to answer with a non-sequitur of my own, something like, “Good question – lemme ask you this, do you think Tito Ortiz has done Jenna Jameson in the butt yet? Because I don’t think he has.”

Instead, I hazarded a guess: “No, I’m not.”

“Oh. Have a nice day,” he said before drifting away harmlessly.

“Thanks,” I replied cheerily.

I love it when I guess correctly.

As you may know, guessing correctly is no easy task. It’s like “The Lady, or the Tiger?” Guess wrong and you lose five minutes of your life to a hemp-chewing mall gnat as he tries to convince you why flattening New York City to plant sorghum makes sense. Guess correctly and you win unfettered access to food items, clothes, and electronics.

But the seasoned clipboard monkey will always ask you a “yes-no” question, and it’s a crapshoot as to what the correct answer is. It’s one of life’s cruelties that there’s no uniform answer.

It’s also a shame that we have to deal with the runts of the activist litter in our mall parking lots. Have you ever noticed that the typical clipboard jockey is always alone? It’s as though their own people don’t even want to hang around with them.

Normal activists know what duds these parking lot loiterers are and foist them on consumers as some sort of practical joke. (“Hey, Rodney, hit the Whole Foods over by State. Stay there and one of us will pick you up at five. ... You got your clipboard, buddy? Great!”)

The activists with social skills and proper hygiene don’t stoop to canvassing in front of Best Buy. They slap utopian bumper stickers on their Honda Elements and brag to the local alternative weekly about the grant money they’ve won.

Just yesterday, an activist who looked like he’d spent all afternoon huffing gasoline caught up to me outside of Trader Joe’s and asked if I were carbon neutral.

“No,” I guessed. “I’m against carbon of any kind.”

Apparently I guessed correctly, because he stopped in his tracks before running off to the next consumer.