URINE REMOVER

We were walking around Lowe’s the other day.  We had just moved into a new house.  It’s the only time my wife likes being at Lowe's.  She gets to decorate.  Organization.  Under the sink storage; closet storage.  We were walking down the cleaning product aisle.  In Lowe's.  Cleaning products.  How did that happen? 

I get how it started.  I'm betting it started with push brooms.  That’s a man’s broom.  Some manly man doesn’t want to use a pink broom to sweep out the garage, so he has a huge push broom.  Then they said, “Let’s add mops.  That’s kind of like a broom.”  Then they had to add the cleaning products to use with the mops. 

And there's toilet paper.

Yes, Lowe’s sells toilet paper.  Really?

I won’t even go there.

HAHA!  Go there………nevermind.

So we’re walking down the cleaning aisle, looking at something to clean our new hand scraped wood floors.  Hand scraped.  I scraped our hardwood floors once and got yelled at.  NOW, they’re the nicest thing to have in your house.  Go figure. 

So I’m a couple of steps ahead of my wife, and she taps me on the shoulder.  I turn around and she is holding a bottle of Urine remover.

Urine remover?  That’s GENIUS!

I look at the shelf, and there is plenty of it.

“Stay here,” I tell her, as I rush off. 

I come back with an empty cart, and start loading up.  Little bit of useless trivia for you here.  You can fit 119 bottles of Urine Remover in a Lowe’s shopping cart.

We get to the register, and the woman obviously wasn’t happy I chose her lane.  Maybe she was at the end of her shift.  But kudos to her; she is trying to be nice.

“Goodness,” she says, looking at the cart.  “Do you know how many you have?”

“No,” I smile.  “I didn’t count.  I just dumped them all in.

She is trying to be polite, but I can sense the tension.

“You must have a LOT of dogs,” she says, shaking her head slightly.

What kind of dumb statement is that?  How did she make that assumption?  I look at my wife, and she gives me a look that seems to convey that I’m the one not understanding something.

She grabs her little scanner, and comes around to our side of the counter.  She grabs an empty basket, and pulls it next to ours.  Picking up the bottles, she begins to scan.

“One, two, three…”

I can see her smile leaving as she gets to around thirty.

“Guess I should have counted them,” I offer.

Her smile is completely gone now.

She empties the partially filled basket and starts over.

“One, two, three.”

I look back at my wife, who is smirking and shaking her head.

I give her the look that only people who have been married for fifteen years have learned to comprehend.  She steps toward me, and says I messed up her counting by talking to her.

“…twenty-one, twenty-two…”

Being the nice guy I am, I quickly apologize.

I hear the sigh escape her lips as she stops.  Once again, she empties the mostly empty cart into my almost full one.

“One, two….”

I feel badly for her.  I was only trying to be nice.  She has a hard job.  A lot of people shopping at Lowe’s are men, and they aren’t there because they get to do something fun.  They are there because something broke, or their wives have decided they want new shelves put up in the laundry.  It’s the weekend, and that means the projects are cutting into our football time. 

I look behind my wife at the other people in line, and there isn’t a smile to be had.  I look back at the checker, still counting.

“Wow.  No wonder you’re so grumpy…”

Ever feel the words coming out of your mouth, right as your brain tells you NOT to say it?

“Thanks, brain.  I know it NOW.”

It’s not even a sigh.  It’s a full-blown groan.

I’ve learned my lesson.  Not another word from me.

Just then, I hear the call come over the intercom.

“We need all available checkers to the front please.”

She was doing wonderfully, and was almost pleasant again as I heard her nearing the eighty mark.

“…76, 77…”

Then the beeping stopped.  I can see she is pressing the little trigger, but there are no beeps to be had.

She looked at me like it was my fault. 

I looked at her apologetically, and said, “guess you should have checked the battery on your scanner, huh?”

Okay, so I hadn’t learned my lesson.

I was happy to get out of there with my loot, and couldn’t wait to try it.

Think about it.  What an awesome time-saver.  And I’m 50.  I need all the time I can get.  No more middle of the night trips.  In fact, I’ll never have to go to the bathroom again.

Yeah, well…that night, the Emergency Room nurses were laughing too.  My wife was laughing so hard she could barely get the entire story out.  I thought that was pretty rude.  I had my head stuck in a little bucket, getting rid of everything I had eaten in the last six months, and they are all laughing at me.  

I think that may have been worse than dealing with the grumpy people at Lowe's.

Mattress Squirm

My daughter and her fiancé bid on a house, and soon, she will be taking her mattress. So a replacement is in order. It was President's Day weekend, and several places were having mattress sales, including Mattress Firm. We found a decent queen mattress at for $400 at the Mattress Firm in North Richland Hills. Since it was for the guest bedroom, it was comfortable enough.

They didn't have it in stock, so I made arrangements to pick it up. I went Monday morning. The same salesman helped me, and told me to pull around back and he would load it up for me. After pulling around the back, I saw he was having trouble locating the mattress. It's a decent-sized store certainly, but it's not like it's the size of a Wal-Mart. How can it be that difficult to find a queen-sized mattress in a mattress store?

Because it's not there, that's why.

He looked it up, and found it had come in. He walked around again, looking for it.

"Someone must have bought it," he said.

Seriously?

Most of the times we've been searching for mattresses, there are a few with "SOLD" signs on them. That indicates to me (and others, I assume), that someone has already paid for that particular mattress, and, as a result, it is no longer for sale.

I understand mistakes happen, and if they were busy, they may have forgotten to put a sold sign on it.

Okay.

So he informs me that they will deliver for free.

Excellent.

"We can deliver it tonight between 6 and 9," he says.

We were going out for dinner for my birthday that evening, so he arranges for it to be delivered the next morning between 9 and 12.

So I get to sit on the couch on my birthday, waiting for a delivery. Not that I had much planned for today. I had done my chores the day before so I could just relax on my birthday.

Am I relaxing? Not much. Granted, there isn't a lot of physical activity going on. But for some reason, I get stressed when I spend $400, and have nothing to show for it. And, while they have my cell phone, I have had no phone call to let me know why they are late, when they are coming, or if they are coming at all.

So I called them.

"What?  They haven't been there yet?  Let me call you back as soon as I find out what is going on."

So twenty minutes later, he calls back, telling me something happened, and that he should be there within the hour.  Great.

Two hours later, I call back.

"What?  They haven't been there yet?  Let me call you back as soon as I find out what is going on."

Deja vu....

Again, I understand issues, and the fact that sometimes, things happen.  But surely I'm not the only one who has them happen.  It seems like it happens a lot, and if this kind of thing happened to more people, stores would not be able to stay in business.  So maybe it IS just me.

After a while, he calls back, telling me he has no idea what happened, how sorry he is, and that he will do whatever he can do to make it up to me.  He'll even through in a free mattress pad. 

Wow.  My time is worth a mattress pad?

After three calls to corporate headquarters, complaining about what happened, they cancelled the sale (after also offering me a free frame or mattress pad).

$400 is a LOT of money to me. I would like to think it's worth something to a company to keep its customers happy.

Then I have to remember one of my first posts about customer service, and how it's virtually non-existent now.

I guess I would never make it in business. Maybe it's just not possible to provide good customer service, and still make money.

What a shame.