Everything You'd Ever Want to Know About Warranties

Yesterday, in the late afternoon, a customer came into the store looking to purchase a chainsaw. He was an older man, and as he walked past me on his way to the saws, I caught a heavy whiff of cigarette smoke. After he had selected a saw and the guys took it back to the shop to fill it with gas and start it, he came back up front to wait. Business on the rental side had been pretty slow all day, and the only other customers in the store at the time were way over on the hardware side. With the exception of their far off chatter, the low mumbling of voices on the radio, and the gentle patter of rain on the roof, all was pretty quiet.

Until he came.

When you buy a Stihl chainsaw or string-trimmer, it comes with a warranty (different lengths of time for different purposes- home use? Professional?).  All you have to do is fill out a little piece of paper with some basic information, and then later on I go on Stihl's website and I enter the warranties, so that if there is a problem with the equipment within the confines of the warranty, we will fix the machine with no cost to you. Fascinating stuff!

Anyway, while this man's chainsaw was being prepped, I figured he could at least fill out the warranty while he waited. So, I took the slip of paper out of the paperwork packet and slid it across the counter towards him, along with an ACE pen.

"Ohh, hell no," he said gruffly. "That's way too damn small, and I didn't bring my cheaters. You're gonna have to fill it out for me, 'cause I can't see a goddamn thing."
Fine, fine. He was not the first to come without glasses and make this request, and he won't be the last. So I pulled the slip of paper back towards me and poised my pen, ready to write.

I would like to stop now and tell you, I had a feeling about this man. I suspected he might be a talker! Because he had begun to chatter as soon as he cleared the front doors, spent a good 10 minutes talking to the guys from the shop, and had been yapping all the way back from the chainsaw section up to the front. My suspicions were confirmed as I asked him question after question and not only receiving his answers, but snippets of his life's story. I will not tell you his personal information, of course, but...

He said, and I quote: "Truckers are the scum of the earth! They are lowlifes with no respect for anybody!" You see, he had been (for a number of years!) a worker at a gas station and had to deal with truckers for a very long time. He had a funny habit of saying something harsh or explicit, and then apologizing for it... right before saying something similar. For example:

"And those messy sonsofbitches-- sorry, hon-- well, you know how they like to piss in bottles, then throw their piss-bottles out the window? Well it's guys like me that have to pick them up! Bastards! Oh, sorry. But you know what's worse?? Now they've taken to shitting-- sorry for the language-- SHITTING in plastic bags and throwing the bags out the windows! And you know who has to pick the shit-bags up? Guys like ME!"

All this-- and more!-- I learned from asking for his name and address! And you should have heard him when I asked for a telephone number... apparently he has "theories" about the government concerning phone numbers. Needless to say, I didn't get it, and didn't even attempt to ask for an email.

Anyway, this just got me thinking and reminiscing about the more more memorable customers I've had.

I remember a year or two ago, my sister and I were working outside in the hot July sun, watering what was left of our greenhouse nursery stock. Two older women came and were checking out the plants-- well, one was. The other was eyeing my sister with fear and distaste.  You see, my sister was wearing a concert T-shirt she had gotten years and years prior, from GIGANTOUR, a metal music festival. On the black shirt was a list of the bands underneath a giant genie coming out of a lamp. I mean, it was metal music so it didn't look like the Genie from Aladdin, but it really wasn't too alarming. But the woman thought so-- because she didn't think it was a genie! She thought it was the devil. And she was aghast! My sister gave the woman's friend a good deal on some of the plants left, and she went happily inside to pay. My sister was helping the pious lady start loading the plants when the lady casually mentioned that she had noticed the devil on the t-shirt, which deeply offended her, and stated that she was afraid for my sister's troubled, disturbed, devil-worshiping soul! Wearing the devil's likeness is inviting him to possess you, don't ya know! Devout as the lady was, she suggested my sister start going to church, or at the very least, read the Bible-- that might make her more willing to cast the devil out!

I know deep down the lady meant well, it was just ridiculous to those who know my sister AT ALL, and my sister found it pretty rude and insulting that the lady lecture her like that. IT WAS A FREAKING GENIE!!

Finally, I remember an encounter I had probably 2 or 3 years ago. I had a man come into the store, and he looked rough. He was pretty obviously homeless and travelling. His clothes were filthy and he had mud caked under his fingernails. From what I could tell, he had two possessions in the whole world- a stained, worn backpack and a best friend, his dog. The dog he left outside. He told it to stay, and it did, his obedient companion. Upon entering the store, he came directly to the front counter.
"Ma'am," he said quietly, "Sorry to interrupt. I saw there's a 'No Backpacks' sign on your door, so here is mine-" he handed it over. "May I please use your restroom?"
For some reason, he just sticks in my mind, because he looked kind of questionable, but he was, by far, the most polite and dignified person I saw all day. And I never saw him again.

I would like to note that the opinions mentioned above are the customer's not mine! For example, I have no problem whatsoever with truck drivers...

Happy Wordsday Thursday, guys!

Sarah

P.S. Thanks Emmy for helping reminisce about your devil worshiping days ;)

Quite a Day

My faithful, die-hard fans (both of you!) know by now that Thursdays are my off! I always make big plans to do productive, sensible things- and true to form, I hardly ever keep my plans, at least not to the extent I intended. But! Today I planned to do all my laundry, and that is PRECISELY what I did. Unfortunately, my own dryer is on the fritz... has been for months now, so I haul my dirty clothes to the cheapest laundromat in town- Dad's house!

I could never make such a trip by myself- or so Otis tells me- so I took her with me. We made a pit stop at McDonalds, which meant 5 minutes in the lunchtime traffic and the 10 minutes to my Dad's house spent trying to keep Otis from drooling on the bag of food. 

I brought myself a special task to do today while my loads of laundry were being washed and dried. For well over a year now, I've been working on a writing project. I am hopeful that this will eventually become my first novel! I have given myself a deadline of sorts... necessary if I want to ever get something definite accomplished and not just have some "project" I work on intermittently for the rest of my life. I have given myself until this coming Christmas to develop a workable, completed BOOK! I'm not being too harsh on myself (yet), and I will consider this deadline met even if I still think I can make it better or change some details or move some commas around. ANYWAY, I have a lot written already, but there is a problem: it is written literally. In journals and notebooks and scraps of paper. And in order to make it into book form and print it, I must now enter all of these handwritten pages into my computer... a somewhat daunting prospect! But that's what I did for a few hours this afternoon. It's actually quite rewarding, because I'm now revisiting chapters I wrote months and months ago, and now I can compare them to what I've written more recently- I can see if things still go together, and remind myself of details I'd forgotten, but now want to feature.

It scares me, but some of the stuff I've written is... not too shabby, if I might say so myself.

But, as well as that went, tragedy struck this afternoon! I was outside watering and I stepped on a loose rock and lost my balance. My foot skidded out from under me and with a sickening crack--- MY CROC STRAP BROKE! You know, that plastic bit that goes behind your heel to keep the shoe from sliding off your foot? Death! I LOVE my Crocs, but few share my enthusiasm. In fact! My sister and my dad have been plotting to get rid of them for weeks now, and today's catastrophe just added fuel to their fire, what with summer ending and whatnot.  This episode is not without precedent, I must admit. A year or two, I wore a pair of Crocs so long that I ACTUALLY wore out the sole of the shoe. Like, the bottom of my foot was touching the ground through the shoe. Sigh. I guess it's time to get out my Converse and my boots.

For dinner tonight, I met my sister and my Grandma at KBOBs. It was busy, which is nice to see... not ALL of Raton is dying. It was a good meal, although as we were finishing our dinners, I had a deep thought: You know how they say the actual definition of insanity is "to try the same thing over and over and expect a different result"? Well, I was testing that theory while my Grandma was eating her peach cobbler. I had stabbed a slice of lemon with my fork and repeatedly licked it over and over, grimacing and shuddering, and then licking it again. WTF? I may be a decent writer, but I don't think I'm always the brightest crayon in the box.

Not much of a blog today guys, but I GOTTA keep writing. It's good for me!

Happy Thursday guys.

Sarah