Christmas shopping nightmares

Weave your tales! I want to hear about everyone's Christmas shopping experience.

I nearly lost it twice. I have no patience for inconsiderate people. I'm back home for Christmas, and thank God it's a small town, otherwise it would have been completely unbearable. As it was, most of my Holiday Nightmare revolved around crowds. The Greater Crowd Theory states that stupid shit multiplies by a factor of ten for every additional person added to the crowd. That's science!

Does anyone have some good stories? Hair-pulling, shopping cart overturning, near homicidal rampage inducing?

Did all my pre-shopping on the net. Most places will now tell you if the item your are looking at is available in your local store. 4 stops, less than 10 miles total driven, less than 4 hours, done. Bank account, successfully emptied.

yeah, but what did you get me?

I finished my shopping list in 20 minutes port to port. I also managed to help a truck driver with directions to get around a low clearance bridge.

A sample of my blog from today:

good on you Paul.

I just dislike the business that the holidays cause in my neighborhood. Things that were once easy, become trying to do. Didn't run across any asshats, but i don't like large crowds of people. This time of year seems to create those.

You sell porn in a kiosk in a mall?

Aw, that is a crazy sweet story.

Not shopping per se, though in my infinite stupidity I managed to obstruct my means to get home this week in every manner conceivable: I unknowingly unplugged my alarm clock the night before I left, thus sleeping in and missing my bus the following morning. Then, I was lucky enough to wrangle another bus seat about an hour later, though it meant having to rush like hell lest I miss my flight. So, the bus pulls into the airport, right up to my terminal, with surprising swiftness; I arrive about half an hour earlier than I expected to. My happiness was expertly turned into abject despair when the woman at the kiosk informed me I was currently situated in San Jose, which would have been fine except my flight left from San Fransisco International Airport.
So, in short I totally missed my flight, and he only other flight to a New Hampshire left from Oakland in a little over an hour. They shuttled me off there but of course I was not in time for that flight either. So, I had no choice but to book a flight for Sunday morning, mind you this was Friday afternoon. However, with the miracle technology of cell phones I was able to coordinate a mercifully inexpensive airport hopscotch that had me getting to Manchester from Maryland, after an altogether unpleasant nights' sleep on the floor of the airport in Las Vegas.

At the very least I had only one carry-on with me, so my numerous trips through airport security were uncharacteristically inconvenience-free.