The Great American Shelving Adventure (Part 2)

 I went to Home Depot today to get shelving for my grandson Harry's room. I don't know how these stores make a profit with the lousy wood they sell. They had a lot of 1x10x8 shelving so I thought it would be easy go get what I needed, but each piece I picked up was worse than the one before it. I had gone through three quarters of their supply to get descent pieces. All of which was a piece of cake compared with my visit to Lowes the other day. I looked at the line by the cash registers and there was none, so I got my cart and loaded up with a piece of plywood for his desk and shelving brackets, along with a door for Timmy and Bridget's house. When I reached the register there was one couple ahead of me and then it happened. Every cash register in the store went dead. All the lights were on, but the registers were not. The couple ahead of me had to leave to get their daughter from school, but now there were all these people behind me. I don't know where they came from; the store seemed empty a few moments before. Everyone just stood there, customers and employees alike, not knowing what to do. Finally a woman came out of the office carrying plastic boxes with paper forms and announced that the cashiers would have to manually write up each item and since nothing has a price tag on it anymore, they would have to GO BACK INTO THE STORE AND LOOK FOR EACH ITEM TO GET THE PRICE!!! Fortunately, I had a pretty good idea of what my items cost and they accepted my numbers, except for two sizes of brackets, which I didn't know and which another employee went back to check while the cashier was handwriting everything. I was lucky. My cashier said she had another job in a clothing store and that they always had to write things up manually. There was generally a chorus of groans from the other cashiers that "We never did this before. How do we do this? We haven't been trained on what to do." To pay, I gave the girl my Lowes credit card which they laid under a piece of paper and proceeded to rub with a pencil to get an impression of it. I didn't mind so much the time I wasted because the whole thing was such a hoot.

  

I now have most of (maybe all) the shelving and brackets I need. I want to let it dry a little before I do anything else with it. Tomorrow, I'll look for some stain. I hope that won't be as adventuresome. In the meantime, where's that dram of Scotch?