Bob

I have to interrupt the vacation posts to tell you a story. Yesterday, during one of our many trips to an un-named big (orange) home improvement store, I went to the return desk while Greg went to pick up some other stuff. I was in line behind a man and his two crazed pre-teen boys, whom he was oblivious to as they were yelling and pretend sword-fighting and flicking some sort of cards at each other. He had a whole cart full of black plastic tubing, and another cart half full of hundreds of little tiny pieces and boxes. When the poor guy behind the register (Jason I think) finally got it all scanned in ($337.00 and some change worth of stuff!) he asked the guy for his credit card to make the return, and naturally the guy had to go back out to his car to get it. And he left the hooligans in the store with us of course.



As I was dodging imaginary swords and pokemon (?) cards flying through the air, I said to Jason, "I don't think I'd want your job." He grinned sarcastically and said, "Why? It's a great job. It even includes babysitting today, apparently." I laughed, said customer came back with the credit card and it was finally my turn.



Jason quickly gets on the intercom and asks for someone from plumbing to come up and get a return. As I was completing my transaction (with receipt and my debit card in hand, thank you very much), this hunched over, tiny, 97-year-old man in an orange apron comes shuffling around me. Jason says "Hi Bob." Bob looks at the first cart, then the second, then back to the first, slowly looks up and Jason and says, "What the hell is this??"



Jason said, "Well this guy needed one inch stuff and he bought all 3/4" so he had to bring it all back." Again Bob does a very slow survey of the carts, slumps over even more, and says, dry as can be, "Well, if he's too damn STUPID to get a measuring tape out before he buys this much stuff you should have charged him a restocking fee!!!"



I watched poor Bob shuffle off pushing one cart and pulling the other one, VERY slowly I might add, and after I stopped laughing I went to find Greg to tell him the story. When we were done shopping (probably a half hour later) I told him we had to go by the plumbing aisle so he could see Bob, and sure enough, he was posted up in the aisle still putting returns out of that cart back on the shelf (at the speed of light as you can imagine). We're guessing it took Bob the rest of the day to empty that cart!