I had an awesome day.

I had a wonderful day on Monday. It was terribly adventurous! It took me until today to write the post as I wanted to make sure it was illustrated.

ACT 1: THE PROLOGUE
For a while I have been wanting to obtain a DDR pad to call my own. I love playing the game and it's great exercise, but I have a hard time enjoying it on the softer pads; you can't play as well. I love playing on these pads:



My brother has some, and while DDR was in it's hayday they were everywhere. Sadly, they are expensive, with a single pad costing about $300. I finally managed to amass the money for the cause. I went onto the Cobalt Flux website only to discover that Cobalt Flux had gone out of business. Noooo!

I still wanted a pad, so I decided to go on an adventure and find myself a Cobalt Flux pad.


These adventurous gentlemen, alas, were not included in said adventure.


ACT 2: THE HUNT

Finding a Cobalt Flux pad proved more difficult than I had originally anticipated. Everyone seemed very happy with the pads they owned, and no one was willing to sell one. Online stores all proclaimed that they were out of stock--all stores save one, which has now--as in the day before I wrote this--gone offline. Finally after sheer luck I managed to find an ad on Craigslist which indicated that a gentleman had a school pad he was willing to sell for $375. School pads are a little different from the regular retail versions that sell for $300. School pads normally cost $700 and look like this:



They are built for public schools. They have higher quality materials and convenient handles and are designed to basically be abused for 7 hours a day and still have a huge long life span. They are lighter than the regular pads and they have no sharp edges. Considering I have cut my feet numerous times on the regular pads this is a nice big relief. I was elated and contacted the gentleman immediately.

No response. Well, that's just fantastic. I tried to reach him a few more times (terribly politely) and then gave up on that venue. Sadly, that venue was the only pad I could find for sale.

Out of ideas, I finally resorted to ksl.com. I came across an ad first thing: a gentleman who wants to unload some pads he has no use for, $150 each. The image he used was the school pads, but I doubted that they were really the higher quality pads. Nonetheless, when I called him, he answered. He was terribly friendly and said that the 4 pads were indeed still available, were actually the school pads, actually cost $150, and he wouldn't mind holding them for me.

That was a jaw-dropping deal, so naturally it seemed too good to be true. Nonetheless, I decided to at least check it out. We arranged a time and place and I borrowed the Prius to head up to SLC. K and I were planning on hanging out all day anyway, so she came along.

ACT 3: THE PURCHASE

We headed up to SLC with the assistance of the ever-helpful GPS system, and we had no trouble following it (don't ever tell anyone otherwise, K!). The only cause of alarm was when it announced "You have arrived at your destination." This was alarming as we were in a low-traffic area and surrounded by warehouses.

When we looked at the warehouse on the right side of the road, we saw a sign we were never expecting:

COBALT FLUX INC.

We were at the warehouse of the company that had gone out of business. We walked through the front door and met one of the employees, who had spoken to me on the phone.



Huzzah!

That's right, folks, I had contacted a former employee who was cleaning out the warehouse. The pads were leftovers that were going to go to the new owner of the place and he wanted to unload inventory. I was purchasing 2 brand new, never been touched highest quality DDR pads for $150 each. I immediately called my brother, who was interested when I explained the situation, and he bought the other 2 pads available.

I took a few pictures while we were waiting for everything to get sorted.



A stack of "lightly used" DDR pads that were pretty much destined for disposal. If anyone else wants a school pad for a ridiculously good price, go get one quick. Seriously. One of the pads we wound up purchasing was one of these, and it looked nice.



K standing near the entrance to the stock area. It was cold in the warehouse, but we were having fun.



Aren't they beautiful? That white stuff is protective, and means the pads are brand new, straight from the factory shelf into my arms.



I asked the employee if we could test the pads (at the time I still thought it was a guy and we were heading to his house to pick up the pads) and he said something could be arranged. In this picture is a pad that was scrapped and therefore just the skeleton, the TV he set up for us, and a huge pile of PS2's that were going to be discarded. Seriously, do you see those two small towers on the table? Those are all PS2's. We didn't get a PS2 because we had no need, but the guy threw in the DDR game we were testing because "I hate that music." It was Disney DDR and it only has happy pop songs, so I can understand his sentiment.



There is something lonely about an empty warehouse, but I had had no idea how big Cobalt Flux actually was. I honestly pictured 4 or 5 guys with one or two rooms, and whenever they got an order they made the pad from scratch for that order. Nnnope, these guys were taking in millions a year, and their school pads were highly successful. Crazy.

Thus concludes the search for the DDR pads! I now own one of my own, so K and I can play freely and often!


THE END

...

On the way back home we got to see something neither of us had witnessed before. A patrol car turned on his lights a few cars in front of us and began weaving madly on the highway. At first I thought he was trying to pass some cars that wouldn't let him by and I was amazingly impressed that we were witnessing an Italian Job-esque getaway in progress. Then we discovered that he was single-handedly bringing the entire freeway to a standstill.

A cop on a power trip, you ask?



No. There were some fellow men in blue walking the freeway just in front of where we came to a halt, throwing enormous chunks of Styrofoam off of the freeway. It was awesome. One car didn't quite realize this is what was happening and tried to cut in front of us, but like a rabid sheep dog the One Patrol Car hounded down on him and cut off his slow advance. It was amazing.

Once the road was clear they let us all go again, but it was fun to be a part of the experience. Also it was nice to be near the front and understand why the entire freeway went from low traffic to bumper-to-bumper stop-and-go.


That's the rest of the story, but K and I did go see a movie later so we snapped this shot:



May the force be with you.