Is This Best Buy Kosher?

My internship demands I run a lot of errands. Pick up blue prints in Union Square. Check. Buy wood glue from the corner hardware store. Check. Cart over 18 boxes of clothes from Target to the rehearsal hall and try not to run over one of those annoying little dog that are fucking everywhere. Check. Carry a tuba 10 blocks to a brass instrument consignment seller. A pain in the ass, and I felt more like street performer than an intern, but astoundingly, somehow, yes, check.

But today, today topped it all. I was left alone to set up our new $10,000 board room projector, and to my surprise, $10,000 does not buy any of the necessary cables to run said $10,000 projector, it just buys a big fat ugly $10,000 projector. So after an unsuccessful stop at RadioShack for a VGA component, I was off, per my supervisor’s recommendation, to B&H. “If they don’t have it, no one will.” I hopped down to 34^th and 10^th, only to find a McDonald’s, wait for my boss to return my “I’m lost” message, buy a Snapple, and then have my boss call and apologize for giving me the wrong directions. However, once in the doors of B&H, I knew my journey was well worth the hassle.

Once inside the establishment, I was surrounded by lots of Jews and lots of electronics. Somehow these things do not go hand in hand, but I digress. The store was big and bigger, packed with TVs and computers and cameras and lots and lots and lots of people. I was immediately reminded of Asheville's local Super Wal-Mart on tax free weekend. Seriously. Only Wal-Marts are much easier to navigate. Here, I couldn't anything, just a bunch of Jewish employees and digital junk, so when I finally asked one of the B&Hers where I could find a VGA cable, he typed something in his computer, told me to wait 3 minutes, and gave me a receipt to take the front. After I found the "front," which was actually just the middle, I paid for my receipt and was given another receipt, where I went to the actual front and waited. Here I realized there was a giant conveyor belt over my head, over everyone's head, over the whole store, and there in the back corner far, far away was a little man throwing things in bins and whisking them all around the store, like he was some crazy wizard running a Coca-Cola bottling factory. I turned in my receipt and a silent Jewish man found a bag on the wall and handed it to me and pointed to the door to leave.

B&H, quite simply put, is a crowded, disorienting Willy Wonka-esque Northern Wal-Mart run by Hasidic Jews, and I'm not sure my shopping experiences can ever be the same again.