What’s not to love about today’s “I Wish I Had Written That” installment? Jeff from The Shape of Days sums up the shopping experience that everyone in the world has had to go through at least once in their life. If you are worried about a little language, you may want to skip it and just read the highlights, but I feel that you will miss the overall feel of the post.

He wants to buy a headset for his cell phone, so he heads to the internet to find the best one:

“Hey, Google,” I asked, “what’s the best mobile phone headset?” And Google answered that as of January 16, 2001, the best mobile phone headset in the world was some cast-iron, steam-powered, cold-forged leviathan so bulky that merely being in the same room with it can cause a strong man’s neck to spasm painfully.

He gripes about people still writing checks. I totally agree:

A word about checks for those of you in the audience who were born after man descended from the trees and developed a taste for day-old gazelle hindquarter on the barren grasslands of Mother Africa: A check used to be a piece of paper that was exchanged in lieu of money. We know this because we’ve found prehistoric checks in the fossil record, buried deep beneath the sedimentary rock that we make middle-school kids go look at as their teacher tries to wow them with the breathless pronouncement that once… this was all a sea. The last known use of a check, or cheque as it was known then, was in a transaction between prolific 18th-century New England religious leader Cotton Mather and his wainwright, a Boston resident named Surcease Weatherborough. Mather hired Weatherborough to repair a wagon wheel for him, paying him with a scrap of parchment endorsed by the Bank of the Old North Church promising the delivery of two bushels of barley and the virtue of any one of Mather’s six daughters except Charity who had been promised to a wealthy son of the Revere family nigh on three summers past, payable next Tuesday or such time as permitting. No actual checks have been used in the conduct of commerce since that time.

His description of the store help is like he has been living my life:

The cashier, who through no fault of her own and certainly with no impact on her character, industriousness or general quality as a person has a lazy eye that’s just totally freaking you out, hands your card right back.

My constant question in such circumstances is, “Which eye do I look at?”

And the best part is about the book receipt that CompUSA gives you:

…and take your receipt, which inexplicably is sixteen inches long and printed on both sides.

I bet you can already guess how this ends. He gets home and what he bought sucks.

Here’s to you Jeff, for putting into words EVERY SINGLE shopping experience I have ever had at electronics stores.

I sense a strong front runner for the third “I Wish I Had Written That Award”.