big pipe purchase

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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").

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big pipe purchase
Thursday, September 18 2008

I drove into town to get some four inch drainge pipe, both the perforated and non-perforated kind. At Lowes they sell HDPE drainage pipe, while at Home Depot it's PVC. But the compatible fittings at Lowes are PVC, whereas at Home Depot they're polystyrene. I do not know what the relative advantages of these different plastics are in their underground environment, though I suspect they will all outlast our civilization, particularly given the amount of shit presently hitting the fan.

For some reason the barcodes on the pipes wouldn't scan, so the Home Depot cashier (who was very new to the job and, being overweight, male, and black, not of the usual Home Depot cashier demographic) had to type their long barcode numbers in manually. Unfortunately, his POS terminal wasn't capable of accepting quantity information for manually-entered barcodes, so he had to type those numbers in in their entirety for each pipe. And I was buying ten of them! This wouldn't have been so bad were it not for the fact that I'd been waiting in line behind a guy who had not only bought enough of these same pipes to drain the foundation for an entire McMansion, but he'd also bought about a thousand dollars worth of other small items.

It turns out that the best way to carry ten four inch by ten foot pipes in a non-hatchback Honda Civic is to poke them into the back seat area from the trunk and let them stick out the back about four feet. I tied them all into a tight fascist bundle and got them all home safely. Unexpectedly, I'd actually had room leftover for five or six more, and I still had a place in the front passenger seat for both dogs.