So something pretty awesome happened while waiting in the lobby at Sears this morning.  There I am, sitting there along with one other gentlemen waiting for his vehicle.  Its awkwardly quiet, so me and him are pretty much just staring at our phones trying to pass the time.  

After about 5 minutes a man of a foreign descent comes in and joins us in the awkward silence.   He must not have owned a smart phone because after about 20 seconds of him staring at the wall, he decides to get up and turn on the tv.  The first channel that pops up is some sort of news channel.  After a quick glance up, I see that it is CSPAN….only something is different.   It has the right logos and stuff, but the broadcast seems a little off.  The headline across the top is, “OIL CRISIS” and the anchors are all very serious about it.  Then I notice that there is a small description on the bottom right that says, “Simulation Broadcast”.  So basically, its a fake.  Apparently the point is to show people what would happen if all of a sudden our oil supply was cutoff from the Middle East.  Essentially, panic.  

Looking back at my phone, I notice that the broadcast is suddenly turned up quite a bit.  The man of a foreign descent has the remote in hand and is staring intently at the screen before him.  He seems transfixed upon it.  Like a deer in the headlights,  the man of a foreign descent isn’t looking away.  I begin to wonder if he realizes that it’s not real and within another 10 seconds I had my answer.  The man whips out his phone and calls his wife, informing her to take all the cars to the gas station as soon as humanly possible, because according to the tv, we were in an oil crisis.  While this is going on, the first man in the lobby and myself exchange telepathic glances that essentially said, “Is he serious?!?!”  You could tell by our faces that we wanted to tell the man of a foreign descent that he was communicating false information, but neither of us had the guts to tell him.  But this show had to go on.  

Literally for another 5 minutes the man of a foreign descent kept rambling about the crisis and by this point, the first man in the lobby and myself are trying desperately to keep ourselves from laughing out loud.  I’ve got my tie in my face hiding my smile, the first man has his phone held up covering his face and during all of this, the man of a foreign descent is still talking.  Then all of a sudden he leaves the lobby and is gone.  Not able to keep it together much longer, I get up and change it to a real news station.  Then the man of a foreign descent comes back in.   

Then I took this picture. One could say he was confused….

Very. Very confused.