My Starbucks Got Rickrolled!

(The images are at the bottom of this post!)

Now now Internet! You’ve gone and carried yourself away, what with your fancy lolcats and newfangled meme’s invading my everyday life!

No, I love the internet, but I should tell you about a very surreal moment that happened all of 2 days ago to me when I stepped in to work and the Internet broke past the 4 walls of my computer screen and into my world in a way I wasn’t expecting.

For those unfamiliar with this blog, first let me say welcome and thanks for visiting! Secondly, let me say I love to write and hope to do so professionally one day, either here in this outlet or elsewhere.

However, I’m not yet doing this professionally, and as such must retain a day job. Having just graduated college all of a month ago, I am still clinging to my part time job which for the past six years has been at a local Starbucks. It’s a very busy store; we get a lot of customers and I typically work nights, but I’m not complaining (at least publicly, here, because corporate might fire me if I do!)

Anyways, I walked in for my closing shift on Saturday night, and as soon as I donned my green apron and walked onto the floor, I could barely believe my eyes! I was greeted by none other than the visage of Rick Astley, microphone in hand, crooning to the masses across our corporate video screen!

This was a historic event. My Starbucks was being Rickrolled, and I was a witness to it!

You have to understand, Starbucks has some sort of a central network where they syndicate their own music, piping in their very own blend of iPhone accessible sounds through speakers and video monitors across the country. Now, I I have no idea if this was a localized event or a system-wide occurrence, but I knew were were getting Rickrolled because the video quality was poor, like a blown up Youtube download, with digital artifacts all over the place… Corporate would have never played such a low quality video across their flat screen monitors.

Again, I don’t know if it was just my Starbucks or if someone decided to have a little fun at music broadcast HQ, but I do have a hunch about it all…

You see, I’m a geek at heart. I can appreciate a good Rickroll. Most of my coworkers were completely oblivious to what was going on and I had to take some time to explain it to them afterwards (which wasn’t exactly successful because a good Rickroll is all about the context of said Rickroll).

Quickly searching for clues, I took a quick look around the store and only saw one middle aged woman in dark sunglasses (which was odd, because she was indoors, at night) who was reading a paper, with what looked like an iPhone or iPod Touch placed on her table. Could she have been hacking the video screen from her iPod? Can you hack a video network like that? I wasn’t about to find out, because that would ruin a perfectly good Rickroll, and once the song was over she left anyways. Regular programming came back on.

I just got a new cell phone but unfortunately I don’t know how to take video on it yet (or even if it can, it’s a Samsung Juke on Verizon, and they always cripple their phones…)

I did however take some pictures. Sorry about the low quality; it is from a cellphone after all…

These pictures are genuine. They are not digitally altered.

Like I said before, the woman with the iPod simply left after the song was up. It was a surreal, baffling, hilarious, and almost hyper-real moment in my life. In the words of Tay zonday, “Man, this Internet thing is wild.”

P.S. - If you still have no idea what this is all about, please see this.

Also, if you like this post, please Digg, Upmod, or Stumble! Thanks! Check out the rest of the site while you’re here! There’s a lot of cool stuff floating around, just waiting for you to see!