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incident at the Kingston Home Depot
Saturday, August 27 2005
My solar project has required repeated runs to various hardware stores, runs that I usually wrap up in other errands or computer housecalls. But when the errand is just to the hardware store, I usually feel an obligation to bring the dogs along. It's not just that the dogs want to go; Gretchen thinks I ought to take them too. I usually don't mind taking them if I know exactly what I'm getting or if it's cool enough to leave them in the car or truck. But when I'm standing in the aisle trying to think what I need, the fact that the dogs are running around hither and yon is a huge distraction, one that makes it impossible for me to, well, shop effectively.
Now that gasoline prices are so high Gretchen has become zealous about rationing our use of the vehicles. Today she needed to do lunch with a friend in Uptown Kingston and I had to make a hardware run, and she was only a few notches below adamant that we combine these into one vehicle trip, complete with the dogs. So I drove everyone into town and deposited Gretchen in the Stockade District and continued on to Home Depot, because I needed a boiler airscoop and I knew it would be substantially cheaper there than at Herzog's.
So there I was in the plumbing aisle of Home Depot with both dogs looking at air scoops and wondering why they all had to be sized for inch and a quarter threaded connections. Then this Home Depot employee, a manager I guess, came up to me to tell me something. I thought he was going to tell me my dogs had to be on leashes (one of them actually was, but I only had one leash and in any case Eleanor was dragging it around freely). But no, he said something absolutely unexpected, "You aren't allowed to have dogs in here." "What?" I said in disbelief, "This is a hardware store and it's hot outside in the parking lot!" "Look," the manager said, "I love dogs, but there are health codes..." This argument was a lie, and both of us knew it. "It's not like you sell food here," I said, adding, "Well, I'll have to go to Lowes then, because I won't patronize a store that doesn't allow dogs." So then I was walking toward the front of the store and he was saying something that kind of tweaked me and I became sarcastic, saying, "I'm sure you're preparing a lot of fine food here."
As I was going out the door, Sally was momentarily delayed and the manager got a little snippy with me. But he made the mistake of doing it in front of a bunch of customers waiting to check out. So I took the opportunity to embarrass him. "Shove it up your ass!" I shouted. His face turned red and rippled with unusual muscle movements as he tried to be professional and contain his rage. "Take your dogs out of here now!" he shouted. At this point I was irate and thoroughly unconstrained by professional concerns. Interestingly, I found my anger focused more on the institution of Home Depot than on this particular manager. And what is it that has galled me about Home Depot more than anything, even their robotic checkout system? That sign on the door that proclaims in an enormous 72 point font that Home Depot drug tests its employees. So, in a seeming non sequitur that must have struck everyone waiting in line as insane, I shouted, "I'm sure you're drug tested! Fuck off!" I hollered for Sally and said "Fuck Off!" again, but by this point the manager had run off, (or perhaps fucked off). Thinking about it later, I thought of some great things I could have said instead had I had presence of mind. One would have been, "Just because I won't let you suck my dick doesn't mean you have to take it out on my dogs!" Another would have been, "You make me feel a lot better about all the shoplifting I've done here through the years."
Meanwhile Sally was doing that thing where she doesn't come right away when I call her. I had to stand there in the automatic doors shouting for her to come for ten or fifteen seconds, which in the context felt like forever.
But Jesus, that sure was satisfying! I think it's good for mental health to take every opportunity one can to tell an asshole off, particularly when there's not a damn thing he can do in retaliation.
I went to Lowes but, fearing the irate manager might have called them to warn them I was coming (I'm convinced the two are run by a single all-encompassing cabal), I left the dogs in the car. It was a reasonably hot sunny day and it was noon and there was no shade, so I found myself running around trying to figure out what I needed as quickly as possible so my dogs wouldn't suffer and die in the car. In terms of shopping experience, it was a complete disaster. And then it turned out that Lowes didn't even have boiler air scoops in stock, so I had to buy one at Herzogs after all. Happily, they stocked one that only required a one inch screw thread connector, which would save me some money on adapter fittings.
In the afternoon I modified an outdoor power strip so that only one of its six plugs was turned on by a photocell at night. I also gave it a much longer power cord, one that could drop down from the solar deck to the outlets on the laboratory deck. But I did something wrong and when I went to test it I blew one the two circuit breakers that supply the laboratory with juice. Or at least I thought I did. Flipping the breaker did nothing to restore power, though one of the outlets on the circuit was working. Hmm, this seemed to indicate that a junction in one of the boxes had been compromised by the amperage surge. I found the problem in the lightswitch box by the laboratory door. One of the conductors in one of the wirenuts hadn't been in there tightly enough and the end of it had melted off and broken the connection. I'd been using this circuit for two and a half years and this had been the first time I exceeded the capabilities of what had been a bad splice. By the way, this draws attention to the fact that electrical fires can potentially start inside household wiring even when the wires and boxes are up to code - all it takes is a bad splice, particularly one in a plastic box.
This evening Gretchen and I attended a Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary fundraiser at the Colony Café in Woodstock. Remember that, improbably, there are two farm animal sanctuaries in this area and that Gretchen and I devote most of our time and effort to the one called Catskill Animal Sanctuary.
Everybody who was anybody really was there, and it was an unusually young crowd for Woodstock. The big draw was Nelly McKay, a young singer/pianist who enjoys airplay on the local independent music stations. Most of the on-air personalities we know from all the local radio stations were in attendance, as were all the familiar vegans and assorted animal rights people. The show began with a stand up comedy act by local vegan Dan Piraro, who draws the nationally-syndicated Bizzaro cartoon. His performance tonight was consistently hilarious, but it went a little too long and took a semi-unfortunate turn for the didactic (in a vegan sort of way) near the end. Gretchen didn't think the people who had come to hear live music performed by a hot new diva were too pleased by a warm up act in a completely different medium.
I wasn't exactly blown away by Nelly McKay. But she does have a lot of stage charisma, and she has a good sense of humor, though (as Gretchen pointed out) it tended to be excessively self-deprecating. Still, it takes decades for
a diva to really come into her own, so who knows what lies ahead.
Since drinks at the Colony are so expensive, we'd been drinking schnapps from a flask. I'm usually tolerant of alcohol in all its forms (remember, I used to drink vanilla), but this was so sweet I eventually had to get a beer to cleanse my palate.
Gretchen and I left before Nelly finished singing, though we were hardly the first to do so. One can only take so much of a diva at a piano.
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