A Foolish Blunder
Friday April 25th, 2025
Today on my lunch break 5K,1 I decided to stop at a gas station, one of a small handful of stores within a 30-minute radius of work, to get something different for lunch. It's not a good gas station, like a 7-Eleven or Sheetz, it's a second-tier regional chain inexplicably named "Par Mar".2 But they at least have some refrigerator sandwiches.
They're one of many stores in my college town that won't let you in if you have a backpack, so I took out the bike lock I keep for this purpose and secured it to a disused air dispenser at the side of the store. I looped it through the fabric top-handle, which isn't the most secure thing in the world, someone with a decently sharp knife could saw through it, but I would only be a couple minutes, it's mainly to keep people from grabbing it and running off.
I picked out my items as quickly as possible, and I was in the checkout line when it occurred to me I didn't think to look at the combination before I closed the lock and scrambled it. Well, it had been awhile since I used it, but I knew for certain the first digit is a 2 and the last digit is a 6. The other two digits will come to me, I reassured myself. In fact, I was pretty sure it was 2586.
Well, I got out with my sandwich and jalapeño cheese puffs, and I entered the combination and realized that the numbers don't go up to 8. They only go up to 6. Okay, I thought, the 3 could easily be mistaken for an 8, so it must be 2536. Still no luck.
Panic set in. I tried a few more adjacent combinations, none of them worked. My lunch break time was steadily ticking away, and I had no idea what I was going to do. I started fiddling with it aimlessly, thinking about all the passers-by wondering what the hell I was doing for so long. I thought about going into the store and asking if they had a pair of bolt cutters I could borrow to destroy the lock, or barring that, a big knife to destroy my backpack. Finally, through sheer dumb luck I fell on the right combination. It's 2532.
So I'm back at work just as my hour was up, eating my crappy microwave burger3 and writing this as my inaugural post in my new blog, because if I post about it maybe I'll embarrass myself thoroughly enough to remember to check the combination next time 🦝
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I.e., my 5000-step walk. ↩︎
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Which I'm unable to think about without my brain appending the word "superstar". Also, I looked it up on their website (they have a website! 😮) and apparently the name comes from Parkersburg (WV) + Marietta (Ohio). So are we supposed to be pronouncing it "par mare"? Bad name. ↩︎
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It cost $5.50. Remember when Hardee's (Carl's Jr. for you westies) had a promotional item called "The Six Dollar Burger"? It only cost like $3.50 or something, but the idea was that the quality was what one might expect to pay $6.00 for in a fancy sit-down restaurant. Such luxury! Such decadence! How far we've fallen. ↩︎