Taxes (reprise), Commercialism, and My Life (in general)

I was going to say that this has been a good week, but really it's only been a halfway decent week. That's fine. Not every week has to be the best week. It wasn't a bad week, anyway.

On Monday I went to file my taxes at BYU. The accounting department at BYU has a service that they offer during tax season, and they'll file your taxes for free. One of my friends told me about it last year, and it worked out well for me last year, so I went again this year. EXCEPT, last year they didn't accept appointments, and this year they started accepting appointments. Which I didn't realize. So everything fills up way faster because they have fewer "stand by" openings. And even though I went as soon as I could, they were done accepting people. Too bad.

I went back on Tuesday, and put my paper on the stack of papers before they were even open. Even though I left my house right after work, and got there pretty early, my little paper (which I had pre-filled-out) was nowhere near the top. It said that the estimated wait was about 3 hours, so I grabbed a sandwich from Subway. I sloooowwwlllyy ate my lunch, and then I went back to the accounting lab on the first floor of the library to wait and wait and wait.

Every really not so often, a girl would come out of the lab, look at the list of appointments, go to the bottom of the stack of standby papers, and call the next person. And then! She kept coming out of the lab(!) and ended up calling a few people instead of just one!

And the last time she came out, she looked at the appointments, and rifled through the stack of standbys, and she just stopped and stood there looking kind of confused.

A girl near me started laughing. (We were about 25 feet away, I'd guess.) The girl near me had gotten up and walked past the stack of papers (and the people waiting over there) about 20 minutes ago. "He put a paper in there to ask her on a date!" she told the people at her table. The girl calling people turned around and started talking to the guy waiting there. I couldn't hear what they were saying. After about four minutes or so, she went back to the stack of standbys again. "Samuel?" she called, grinning. She looked around at all of us who were waiting. "Sorry about the delay." AWESOME. It made me happy. It also made me wonder a lot: did she know him already? She was pretty. It could have been some random guy. Did she actually accept and go out with him? Who knows.

And then on Thursday something else happened that was wonderful. I passed by a Goodbye! party for Thirdmango. While I was there, Optimistic told me about a blog that I needed to be reading but had never heard of. And when he told me about it, everyone else was like "Emily doesn't read it? OHH." And everyone started telling me the basic idea behind it. It's called The Leila Texts, and it turns out, it actually is something that I love. Basically, it's this girl who-- by some random Verizon technology twist-- receives tons of texts meant for other people with her name. If you have never read it, you should. It's really excellent. She copies all of the texts she receives onto her blog and then writes really funny comments along with them. And if it had happened to, like, a grandma, it probably would have been less funny, but it's this 23 year old girl. Super.

AND, at the same party, I saw Mr. Keith. He was the first person I knew to get an iphone. And he let me play with it at Happy Pirates when it was still really new. Anyway, he had seen my Gchat status (16GB of AWESOME!) and had guessed that I had one too, and we talked iphones for a little while. Fun! He really strongly recommended me getting an Invisible Shield on my phone.

Now here's the thing about Invisible Shields: I really didn't know much about them before my chat with Mr. Keith. I knew that my mall has one of those like, carts in the middle of the walkway for Invisible Shields, but frankly, I always sort of thought they were lame. I kind of compared Invisible Shields with Ab Rollers and Magnet Bracelets and other Infomercial treasures.

Mr. Keith told me all about them though. They make phones grippy, instead of super slippery. I've worried about that since I got my phone. He let me look at his. Hm. Grippy is good. AND, they protect the phone. Mr. Keith said he didn't want any scratches on his phone at all, so that was important to him. He could slide his iphone across the floor and with the Invisible Shield it wouldn't be scratched at all. You wouldn't even be able to tell. No way, I told him. He said he'd done it before. And his phone wasn't scratched. Hm. He said it was worth every penny, and that I should get one. So I (of course) immediately wanted one.

And I got one on Saturday. So far I really like it. Another benefit of the Invisible Shield: my phone fits better in my pocket, since it isn't a bulky case.

I can think of a few things that people have strongly recommended to me: Tilex (which is a bathroom cleaner, and WORKS), and The Magic Eraser (which is another cleaning product). I haven't bought any Magic Erasers yet, but I have had multiple people strongly recommend them to me. And I promise, I really don't go around talking about cleaning products with me. So for them to come into random conversation with someone my age, from multiple people, I expect them to be amazing. Also, pork salads from Cafe Rio. I used to get steak. Now I only get pork salads there. Someone strongly encouraged me to try that, and there has been no going back.

I asked one of my coworkers if she had ever bought something because someone else had really talked it up. She couldn't think anything at first, and then she said that she went to MAC because I recommended it. It's true. I do recommend MAC. Whenever people compliment my complexion, I always tell them it's actually just that I do a good job with my makeup. Which is also true. I hadn't realized that she went though.

So I have a question for all three of my readers: What have you bought because someone else made it sound like you should really get it?

I realize that people have had experiences like the one that LJ had with her Jambalaya, but surely you've bought something good because someone recommended it.