The biggest waste of time...or maybe not

A time waster has entered my life as of 10 o'clock PST Tuesday night. Actually, it's come and gone before. It is here now and I am wasting the days on it.



Woot.com. One item per day. From 10pm to 9:59pm the next day Woot sells one item for 24 hours. When it's gone it's gone and there is no new item until the next day. That is not the time wasting part. The time waster is known as a Woot-off, where they sell item after item after item in a massive warehouse clearance. And I want the elusive Bag of Crap.



And why would someone want something called a Bag of Crap? Because it's a grab bag and you can get cool stuff or, as the name would suggest, total crap. It's very, very hard to score a Bag Crap. The server almost always crashes with people flooding the site attempting to win the crap for a mere $1 plus shipping. Sometimes people get Roombas or even TVs. Other times, camera bags or Zodiac symbol drink stir sticks. There is no rhyme or reason to when the BOC will show up so all I can do is hang here by the computer and wait hitting f5 on a fairly regular basis.

The best part is that I do not wait alone. In this time of Internet message boards and long distance friendships, I wait with my friends. We have a message board home and we start a thread for the Woot-off and we chat and ignore our children and chat and ignore our work and chat and hit f5 on the other open tab and chat some more. Inevitably someone will post "CRAP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" and we will all rush to the other tab to try to get the BOC.

I have come to the conclusion that it is not the BOC I love the most, but rather the company I keep while attempting to score said bag. So while Woot-offs may initially have been a waste of my time they are now a welcome excuse to hang with my friends, albeit online, and just relax for a while. Anything I may Woot (buy) during a Woot-off is like a party favor and a BOC would be like the prize for playing a party game. I may not always win the game and there might not even be any favors, but hot damn the party sure is fun. So thanks to my girls: B, H, J, L, E, G, C, S, S, T, M, B, C, C, A, S and K. You make the Woot-offs about so much more than crap.