It's possible some of you have heard about Woot!, but in case you haven't here a quick crash course.

Woot! is an online retail store that sells one item each day (called "The Daily Woot") at an unusually marked down price. The Woot goes up at midnight and is sold until either a) the item is out of stock or b) the day is over in which the next woot is placed on the site. They usually sell high tech gadgetry, but I've seen fondue pots and hair curlers on there before. For a more indepth explanation try their Wikipedia article.

I've been known to hit the Woot from time to time but I've never bit the bullet and grabbed some swag, until recently. Actually, the first Woot I was compelled to bite on was a Monster Surround Sound speaker system they had up on New Years day this year. I had recently lost my computer speakers, along with everything else I've ever owned (thanks Katrina!), so you could say I was in the market. And for a paltry thirty bucks, or somewheres about there, it sounded pretty solid.

Alas, it was not meant to be. By the time I had noticed it they had completely sold out. In the "out of stock" sense, their artistic integrity was still very well intact.

But this would not be the last time the Woot and I would cross paths. For reasons stated earier, I was sans many of my home electronomagigs and a TV was high on this list for early replacement. Brenda has mentioned a 42" LCD she had an eye on over at Best Buy, which was somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,700, an egregious amount to be sure. But lo! A scant few days before we were to take a trip to Red Stick to settle on one, the Woot giveth. A sixty-one inch (!!!) beauty of a DLP Rear Projection TV for less than the 42" Brenda had been looking at. Add in $5 shipping for a 180 lbs TV, and a top notch blender bundled with it, I was sold. The Woot had me.

Now, I'm not a high roller by any means, this is too fucking much to spend on a television. The only way I can rationalize it would be to say that... well, I really can't rationalize it. At all. But holy fuck! I'm going to have a TV the size of God's face!

Lucky we have an extremely low interest loan from SBA, with a pretty reasonable payment each month. This is what they gave us the money for, sorta.

One of the things that sets Woot apart from the rest, apart from their odd "deal-a-day" scheme, is they truly are a funny bunch of bastards. Just read their post that accompanied my purchase: linky-poo. If that's not enough for you, just check out this correspondence I had with them when I initially had a little trouble placing my order:

Dear Woot,
I would like to buy one of the TV's you are selling today (1/12/2006) but my debit card has a frigging purchase limit of $2,500. I have more money in this bank account, but I cannot make a purchase larger than this on one card. Is there a way I could split my payments on two cards?
-Brent

Sorry we are only able to use 1 card per transaction. You may try calling your bank to get the limit raised. Threaten them with bad poetry and tiki torches. This usually works for me.
~E

These are my kind of people.