Ophelia Doesn't Effect the Movie Rental Business

This will give everybody a laugh. John Hawkins over at Right Wing News is living in the Carolinas and got hit with that annoying little hurricane today. Here's one of his updates:

3:38 PM After taking a nice, refreshing nap, I woke up and was amazed that I still had power. At that point, I had to decide what to do: work on the page? Read? Clean the house?

No! I am a blogger, I'm a journalist! I have a responsibility to report the news! Of course, maybe I should have thought about that before I took a 2 hour nap, but that's water under the bridge at this point.

It was time for me to take action, so I asked myself the question every blogger should ask themselves when they're in the middle of a disaster: what would Geraldo do?

Immediately I grabbed my digital camera, got Patton the storm chasing dog, and hit the road looking for downed trees, flooded areas, and old ladies who needed to be rescued.

But after hitting the road, I found that the damage wasn't that bad. There was no flooding in any of the low lying areas in my immediate vicinity. There were lots of limbs down, but that just doesn't have the same visual impact as a whole tree laying in the road. I did see a porta-potty blown over in a ditch, but how bad is that unless you're in it when it goes over?

So fortunately, it looks like my area -- at least so far -- is going to come out of the storm pretty well. In fact, there were even a few businesses that have already opened back up. Walgreens? That made sense. But, there was a movie rental place open. Who rents movies in the middle of a hurricane? You know what would have been funny? If I had stopped in, gotten a membership, and then rented a copy of "Twister" and left.

I used to work at Blockbuster Video and I wouldn't be surprised at all if this was their shops that was open. And the fact that people were renting there is also no surprise. Blockbuster opened a mere 2 hours "late" on Christmas Day but my manager would get evil glares from the waiting crowd. One day, a tornado was spinning a mere 20 minutes from our town but people were casually coming in to rent. I was the manager on duty that day and spent half the time starting out the window, running emergency plans through my head.

If people can't even plan ahead to pick up a movie the day before a holiday or the day before a hurricane hits, how could we possibly expect them to actually prepare for a real disaster? You know, the kind where they can't pass the time by watching old movies.

And sorry, but Twister was probably already gone. People tend to rent movies that pertain to the news of the day. After 9/11, there was a huge rush on airplane movies like Air Force One and Executive Decision.

I hope they gave the workers extra pay at least.