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Asian shoplifting syndicate
Thursday, September 11 2008
This morning while continuing the digging of the long trench that will drain the foundation hole of my greenhouse, I broke my expensive mattock, the one with the wide hoe-end. It had a lifetime warranty, so I figured I'd just go back to Lowes and replace it.
At some point Ray randomly appeared, having driven up from Brooklyn. The house he's interested in buying was to be inspected today and he wanted to know if I wanted to come along. It didn't sound like the most interesting gig in the world, but it's always fun hanging out with Ray, so off we went.
The inspector had the energy of someone who was eager to impress a long time ago and fell into the habit of telling how many inspections he's done (3000) as his way of breaking the ice. His staccato formalism struck me as the sort of thing forged in the military, so I never warmed to the guy. But he had some useful information. He thought the roof and furnace were reaching the end of their lives and that the well didn't supply enough water. My main problem with the house concerns Sawkill Road, which is so busy that often when you want to cross it you have to stand and wait for some cars to pass.
After the inspection, Ray was down four hundred and some odd dollars and had a three-ring binder of color printouts showing all the things wrong with his house. He drove me out to Lowes and I returned the mattock. There was a little confusion at the return desk, partly because I didn't have a receipt and the mattock was too beaten up to have a barcode. She told me to go back to the seasonal department and talk to them. I did and got a replacement and was going to just walk out with it, feigning confusion, but the woman at the return desk hollered at me, saying "You just can't take something without a receipt." I feigned ignorance, though of course what I'd been doing was a combination of testing their security and avoiding waiting in line. Meanwhile Ray was looking at knives in the tool department, and when I went to get him, I could see a Lowes employee watching him suspiciously. I've never seen Lowes employees watching anyone suspiciously, so it made me think perhaps the Kingston Lowes has been hit hard by an Asian shoplifting syndicate. (Ray is Filipino.)
This evening as I was working on an ongoing web development project when I caught the news that Sarah Palin had just given her first unscripted interview (with Charles Gibson) and it had proven something of disaster, and not just because she called him "Charlie" and used his name as a form of sentence punctuation. Every new revelation that shows her to be nothing but the annoying woman at the PTA meeting cheers me enormous.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?080911 feedback
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