Help, HELP! I’m Trapped at Target!

I am passionate about… shopping at Target.

A bad day shopping at Target is better than the best day NOT shopping at Target. Am I right?

In case you haven’t noticed, Target features quite predominantly in many of my posts. There was the dream where I lost my daughter when she ran into a Target.
Target figured predominantly in the post about my daughter’s petrified poop.
And who can’t write a post about misbehaving kids without sticking a Target reference in there…

Maybe this on our Target’s door would make me NOT go in? If only.

I tell ya, it’s that famous hypnotic eye.  It does stuff to you.  Hypnotic eye?  If you read Parenting, Illustrated With Crappy Pictures, Amber Dusick penned (er, drew) it perfectly.  She surmises that bullseye is actually a big eye that hypnotizes you into buying all kinds of crap you really don’t need.  She is a genius-she is so right.  It’s either some sort of hypnotic eye or something they pipe into the store, like a nerve gas…

So my story today begins with a shopping trip.  This particular day I had come to town to get ingredients for a pudding cake.  If you’ve never had pudding cake, it may sound kind of weird.  Basically it’s a yellow cake with holes poked in it and then chocolate pudding poured over it.  Me not being a pudding person or a cake person, I wasn’t all that excited about it, though I was intrigued since I had never seen such a thing.  But The Princess was totally enthralled by the idea of making such a magical treat and off I went to get the ingredients.

As I stood in Fareway amongst the cake mixes, that’s when Target started calling to me.  I quickly moved to the pop aisle to check some prices.  I was trying to do the math on my pop because I’m addicted to Diet Sunkist Lemonade and must get it as cheap as possible.  I concluded that I could save a whole 50 cents if I drove over to Target-don’t mock me, it was the damn store calling me from clear across town.

I arrived at Target and was instantly lured in by it all.  I am incapable of just walking into Target, getting something, and getting out.  I have to see it all, lest I miss a great deal on something I can’t live without. It doesn’t help that the soda aisle is clear almost in the back of the store.  You have to go past everything just to get there.  There is something in that store that causes your mind to go blank.  You have to go perusing the end of every aisle trying to remember just what you went in there for.  15% off!  30% off!  And occasionally 50% and 70% off!  When Easter stuff was 90% off, I almost bought some of it just to say I got something for 90% off.

Apparently whatever it is that clouds your brain works a little too well.  What should have taken five minutes took 30 minutes.  I walked up to the front with my twelve pack of pop and paid the cashier, parked the cart and left to go out to the car.  This particular day I had brought my husband’s car.  His fancy schmancy Nissan doesn’t actually use keys.  It has buttons.  This is both good and bad.  Good because you never have to actually take the keys out of your pocket, and bad because you never have to actually take the keys out of your pocket.

I got in and realized that there were no keys in my pocket.  Which meant I had taken the keys OUT of my pocket at some point, even though I didn’t NEED the keys for anything because THE CAR STARTS WITH A BUTTON.  Step on the brake, push the button. As long as the keys are in the car it is supposed to start.

According to the car, there were no keys in it.  It did not start.  C-r-a-p.

Reality was starting to sink in.  I returned to the store and asked at the service desk. No keys.  I asked at the checkout.  They had not seen them either.  This meant that I had left my keys in the cart. I must be very weak, because I needed a cart for one item.

So I started looking through all of the carts.  I went around the outside and peeked into each cart.  Then I frantically starting pulling carts out.  No keys. Pretty soon this behavior attracted some attention-the guys in the red polos came over to help the crazy lady throwing around the carts.

After a few minutes of this with no avail I walked away and decided to call my husband.  He didn’t answer.  I texted him too.  No response.  Fabulous.

This was when I realized that I was TRAPPED IN TARGET.  This is like having PMS and being locked inside a Chocolaterie Stam.  It can only end very badly, with the Starbucks smells and the bargains, I could very well be in big trouble.

I had one thing working for me-sooner or later Evil Genius was going to realize that his wife had not returned with those ingredients.  Just to be sure, I messaged him on Facebook.  “Hey, check your phone!”  Then I tweeted…

(For the record, Evil Genius doesn’t Twitter for religious reasons.  He thinks it’s stupid.)

The minutes dragged on.  The awesome employees at Target were busting their humps trying to help little old me.  One girl walked all through the store on the off chance that maybe I had laid my keys down to look at something.  Another girl called around to the other employees to keep their eyes open for them.  They finally gave me a choice-I could give them my number when the keys turned up, or they could try to make an announcement over the loudspeaker.  I chose to wait it out and give them my number since I was already dying of embarrassment (have YOU ever heard them use the intercom at Target?  Me neither).

Thankfully, by this time Evil Genius had finally answered my repeated phone calls, and was ready to drive the half hour to get me if need be.  We decided to wait twenty more minutes. Two minutes after I hung up with him one of the service desk girls came bringing them to me.  They were in a cart, taking another ride all around the store.  I snatched them and got the heck out of there.

I arrived home over an hour later than I had intended.  I had to share my experience on Facebook when I got home.  Man I was proud of myself! An extra hour in Target with nothing to do but wait and I survived without buying anything extra!

For the record, it was all worth the trip to town.  As you can see, the story had a happy ending.  She got to make her pudding cake…

Pudding cake diva

This post was written as part of Finish The Sentence Friday.  Click the link and check out what other people are passionate about.  By the way I AM passionate about other things…

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