Home Depot is hilarious.

Last night I bought a Ryobi cordless tool set at Home Depot that’s supposed to come with a drill, a small circular saw, a battery, a carrying case, a saw blade, and a charger. What was in the box was… a dusty carrying case with the drill missing the chuck, the circular saw with the blade missing, and no battery or charger.

I brought it back today and they had no problem with exchanging it, but then the girl who handled the exchange asked her manager what to do with the incomplete box.

“Tape it up and put it back on the shelf”.

I asked the manager immediately what they were going to do when it came back AGAIN, and for that matter, how many times she expected it to come back again? She sighed and explained it was just corporate policy – if the item LOOKS saleable, they have to keep putting it back out over and over and won’t get new ones in until the old ones stop coming back.

Gotcha. So next time I do everyone a favor and soak the box in used motor oil and glitter.

Where the common and mundane become unattainable.

A couple of years back I had to install a toilet. When you install a toilet, there’s a seal between the base of the throne and the “closet flange” on the top of the drain pipe, which can be an oddly shaped gap– the usual type of seal is a paraffin wax gasket that’s crushed into place under the toilet as you place it. All of the stores in Miami had USED wax rings in their boxes waiting for you. Of course, a crushed wax ring is useless, not to mention THAT HAS BEEN UNDER A TOILET THANK YOU NO. My only guess as to how they were getting these was that customers were buying new wax rings when removing and reinstalling toilets during renovation/flooring work and just returning the old ring in the new box… but you couldn’t find a new one! I wound up having to buy a wax ring from an Ace Hardware store an hour’s drive away.

It also reminded me of how a former customer of ours back when I worked at the Solar Shitshow in Miami  (please, stop having your customers call me, I haven’t worked there in years and have no interest in doing so again!) would come to Miami from Haiti every couple of months. When he did, he’d rent a car at the airport, usually preferring a Ford Mustang. In his luggage he’d have a few defective engine management sensors and other parts for a Mustang there, and would swap them for the working ones in the rental car, returning the poor thing barely working in limp mode….. I’m not sure whether that’s more clever or pure evil.

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