My fellow Stamford area bloggers couldnt care less about all my techie talk, so I figured I would help round out today’s AppleFest with a traditional rant about something local - Stamford Town Center.

I hate it.

Once you get to Stamford Town Center, you are met with a horrifically complex and poorly signed parking garage which can only be described as ‘maze-like’ labyrinthine. I have no idea which way to go, or where to park - there are plenty of options, but not all of them are a good idea.

Once you do pick a space, you are met with - a parking meter???! Most of us like going to Malls to avoid parking meters - but this one’s got em! Why they decided to install a few hundred parking meters, rather than a handful of exit booths like Westchester, is beyond me.

On the plus side, $.50 for 3 hours is a pretty good deal - but I don’t dislike parking meters because of the price, I dislike them because I never have any change.

Ed. - I hate coins. I just as soon voluntarily walk around with a pocketful of bolts and screws and barter with them. Probably the worst country in terms of coins I have visited is Spain (probably not anymore now that they have the Euro). Buy a cup of coffee in Spain, and you will likely get a heaping handful of different sized coins with the combined weight of a cueball in return.

Next, we enter the mall. If you didn’t get vertigo in the parking garage, it will hit you in the mall. Again, its a maze which is difficult to spatially comprehend - standing in the carpeted center court of stairs, you might feel it had been designed by MC Escher. It reminds me of the endless serpentine underground malls in Montreal, or the winding intercasino corridors of Vegas.

The first thing you will want to do is find a map, which, curiously, are NOT posted at each entrance. Indeed, you must get lost before you can find yourself.

Yesterday me and another guy were standing next to each other staring at the map - for a long time. Finally he said ‘I have no f***ing idea where we are!’. I laughed and confirmed that, if there was indeed a ‘you are here’ icon on the map, I sure as hell couldn’t find it. We attempted to triangulate our position by determining the stores we were standing next to. This helped with location but not direction. We both wished each other luck and went our separate ways.

Luckily, I was headed for Macy’s - an anchor store - and I could just see the distant Macy’s sign from where I was standing. On my way there, I passed my map buddy, who was still lost. He scribbled a note and handed it to me, asking if I could pass it on to his loved ones in case he never returned.

This was actually a good day, compared to the first time my wife and I attempted to find the mall’s movie theatre which, at best, is ‘theoretically possible to get to without going outside’ of Stamford Town Center. In order to find it, you take a left at Macy’s and wander around the business offices for the mall realtor - hopefully following others who have traveled the path before.