This isn’t so much a customer gripe as a WTF moment that could have happened anywhere. I had a pair in last night that appeared for all the world to be a dad and his, oh, I dunno, 10-year-old son. I don’t know for certain that I ever heard the boy call the man “dad,” but they were very clear that they were looking for barstools for the kid’s mother as a Mother’s Day present.
I leave aside the question of whether barstools are a great present for Mother’s Day. It’s perhaps an unorthodox choice. But they were convinced she’d be happy, so whatever. They ended up picking some red stools that were available in several other colors, mostly because red was Mom’s favorite color and were definitely the color she wanted. Okay, cool. $58 each, bropeople, thanks.
An hour or so later, the phone rang. It was Mom. I recognized who she was from her name immediately because their name was one of those hyper-Polish collections of consonants that are thirty letters long and somehow phonetically identical to “Smith” when pronounced.
And then something really weird happened.
“My husband and my…”
two second long, uncertain pause
“…friend were in there earlier, and they bought some bar stools for me?”
Now, I immediately can reconstruct what’s going on if it’s her “…friend” and her son. That’s a somewhat uncertain relationship between two adults. Cool.
But in what world is your relationship to the ten-year-old, a kid who calls you Mom, weird enough that you pause before describing him as a “friend” to the furniture salesman who you have never met on the other side of the phone? Especially when she’s just calling to see if they’re returnable for another color (they were) and you don’t really need to go out of your way to name your relationship to these people in the first place unless you want to?
Creative writing assignment, guys: figure this nonsense out.
If you shave your head in a hurry while you’re getting ready for work in the morning, and then once you get to work you discover a huge patch right above your left ear which somehow you appear to have missed entirely, and since you were a couple of days behind on shaving your head anyway that patch looks like you left it there on purpose, the pocket knife that you keep with you at all times is not going to be remotely sharp enough to carefully correct the problem in the men’s room before the store opens.
This is what happens when you have a kid who likes books and two parents who really like books but you cheap out on the bookshelf in his room and buy a piece of flatpacked, chipboard junk from Target instead of a proper bookshelf for your kid: one night, as your wife is putting the boy to bed, the fucking thing explodes.
Left work tonight hungry as hell and decided I really, really needed some tacos. Which is an impulse that I ought to curb anyway, frankly. I ordered a certain number of items and paid for them and drove away.
Some of our tables– most of them, actually– have leaves in them. Any table that is on a pedestal is generally a breeze to put in and/or take out the leaf; the halves of the table are counterweighted and you can pull them apart with one hand.