Tuesday, June 22, 2010

We'll Try And Stay Out Of Your Way

I had to go to Home Depot today, because the doors on our shed have literally started to disintegrate. The shed was built about 20 years ago, so I would say as doors go, they have had a pretty nice run. Anyway I was wandering around the store with my dad, gathering all the necessary lumber to build new doors. (These new doors will lead to us noticing how the rest of the shed doesn't look so good by comparison and thus we will just end up building a new shed within a year. Just giving you a heads up on some future postings.) It was at this point that I noticed something about being in a Home Depot in the middle of the day on a weekday - the contractors do not appreciate you being there. You know who the contractors are right away, because they pull up in those F-350s with every single accessory you can think of and a truck bed tool box that could hide a small family inside of it. Also, they park by the special "contractors entrance" which is twice the size of the normal doors because that's where all the lumber heads out. They know right where they want to go and have every aisle's layout memorized because they have to be there so much. Therefore, they do not appreciate the everyman who decided that today would be a good day to install a new ceiling fan and is slowly wandering the store in the middle of every aisle looking for the lighting section. They would much rather you wait until Saturday, at which point they will be nowhere near their local hardware store.

Now, you might be expecting me to lay into these guys, because assuming you have the right to look down on people in a store that is not named after you is kind of a dick move. However, I'm going the other way and saying that I get where they are coming from. When I worked in a football stadium I hated the people who only came in to work on game day. I had just spent six days getting the place set-up as I needed it and these people would just come in and cause havoc: take things without asking, go on break without saying anything and disappear for long stretches. This wasn't there job, this was what they did for a cool second job so they could tell people they worked for the Patriots (which they did not) and see the game for free (which they were not supposed to be doing). So, I can see why these contractors would not like people who mostly have no idea what they are doing wandering around, in the way, when they just want to grab their crap and get back to work. Not to mention, they probably assume that since you are in Home Depot on a Tuesday afternoon and not at work that you have the day off and no one who is at work likes anyone who has the day off, ever. So, I guess the moral of this story is that if you want to work on a home improvement project on a day off and you need to go to Home Depot, don't get annoyed when the contractors sigh heavily at you.

-In my continuing efforts to rebuff joining Facebook, I try to tell people I don't want to sign up because of security concerns. "But, they've done a lot of work on safety," the person will invariably reply. Yet, about four or five times a day I will open my email and be greeted with a message from "Facebook" that "Sarah" or "Jody" or "Mark" has sent me a Facebook message. I made the mistake of opening one of them, because one of the first times I got this email the person who designed the spam managed to luckily and randomly pick the name of a person I happen to know. It was actually an ad from some other website and I haven't opened one of these emails since. My point is this: if it is this easy to create an email account that says the spam mail you are sending out is from "Facebook" and these emails have been going out for months without anyone at the actual Facebook thinking that perhaps they should put a stop to them, then my guess is that security still isn't tight as a drum over at that operation.

2 comments:

Katie said...

I'm pretty sure I just got trash talked about in your blog. Not to mention the fact that your sisters did as well.

Dang.

Oh, and I totally used to work for the Patriots. They RELIED on me for game day to happen. :)

Tom said...

Don't worry, I wasn't referring to you guys. You worked in food and that wasn't my area. I meant those annoying bartenders and people up in the suites.