Driving Me Insane

BudLiteGood morning, y’all. Another gorgeous day here in the mountains. It would be hard to ask for nicer days. It is starting to warm up a bit, but it hasn’t reached my 85 degree cutoff yet. It is my general practice to not work outside after the temperatures reach the mid-eighties. I don’t look good in a hospital gown, and that would only be if the heat stroke didn’t kill me outright. Know your limits, I always say.

There is stuff to do once the heat gets out of my comfort zone. Today I went into town to the Home Depot and went shopping for some necessaries. I loaded up on weed and feed and cypress mulch. The mulch was on sale and the weed and feed was overpriced, so I guess we struck a balance by the time it was all over.

I like the way Home Depot employs their people as greeters when they’re not otherwise occupied. It is a sometimes thing, but it’s a nice touch to have someone near the front door that can tell you that chain link fencing is in aisle 11, or wherever. Without the greeter, you’re left to wander the acres of items until you happen to find what you’re looking for. I know sometimes I’ll wander so much that I suffer sensory overload from all of the stuff that I think I might need someday. Sometimes I get so overloaded with possibilities that I forget my original purpose. I’ve also been known to be standing five feet from my objective and have to ask where what I’m looking for is. Fortunately, I’ve never had a Home Depot employee act “put out” at pointing out the obvious to me. That’s a good thing. I’m generally already put out myself because I’ve had to drive to town to buy a part or tool to fix something that some nitwit broke.

If a Home Depot employee treated me discourteously I would probably lose it. Funny thing, I was already miffed when I came in the store today because some conehead had parked his truck across three parking spots. It was a good looking truck, and deserved to be protected from nicks and dings, but, the owner could have parked further from the store and not have had to worry. Instead, he somehow found three spaces close to the store, and parked across them. Some people have no social awareness it seems.

For example, there was this fellow that was talking on his cell phone at the top of his lungs while I was trying to ask the Home Depot associate if the mulch was going to still be on sale this weekend. This guy was yammering on and on about some big barbecue they were planning. I couldn’t tell if the guy was deaf, or if the person he was talking to was. Either way, me and the rest of Home Depot didn’t need to know how many people were coming, if they needed to serve beef and chicken or pork and chicken, if paper plates would be alright or if they needed to use Chinet. At least he didn’t try to speak over me to get his question answered. I believe there would have been a “clean up on aisle 4” if that had happened.

Anyway, I got what I was after and drove around to the pickup area to get my mulch. Lo and behold, there’s big mouth cell phone guy in his fine looking truck that requires three spaces to park. He was loading up on charcoal and enough preformed rock to make a monstrous fire pit. He finally got loaded and I got my turn. It was quick and easy. Heading home, I caught up with loud mouth cell phone guy at the first light on Highway 515. Well, the light changes, and there we sit. Now, I’m not one to blow my horn, so I gave him a lot of slack. When I finally tooted my horn, the fellow looked up from whatever he was doing to be just quick enough to be the last one through the light. I guess he had some Angry Birds that needed killing.

Let me just say here that while I embrace new technology, I don’t think we’ve had the required generations of training sufficient to use some things responsibly. I’m thinking this old boy’s Momma would have smacked him across the back of the head for any number of the socially unacceptable things he’s done today. Fortunately, I no longer see it as my responsibility to train those who are in desperate need of a manners lesson. Life’s too short, and there’s too many idiots with guns.

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