For those who have not been exposed to the clever marketing strategery behind Girl Scout Cookies, it basically goes like this: About this time every year, thousands of young girls sell boxes of cookies on heavily-trafficked street corners for fundraising. The cookies are only moderately tasty. The girls are of course much too young to be interesting to even a dirty old man such as myself (although they are often accompanied by mothers who are). The trick is that the cookies only have limited availability -- not only are they only sold a few weeks in each year, but the scouts also seem to have this uncanny ability to disappear from street corners exactly when you want to buy a box.

Being denied something repeatedly, of course, means that I crave it even more. The box of Thin Mints than I bought at lunchtime is almost gone. I blame my officemates.