The Source Of So Much Entertainment

A booming voice filled the house at the crack of dawn, a man screaming out of our answering machine that THE MICROWAVE! IS SCHEDULED FOR DELIVERY! TOMORROW! BETWEEN 11:30!

Wait, what? Between 11:30? And 20 seconds? Some recording woke me up to give me a four-hour window that is only 60-seconds long.

I wish we still had the message, I'd have played it for you...but when the machine says, "Press erase again to delete all messages," my mother takes that as a suggestion.

So I guess that concludes the saga of the microwave. Unless like the dishwasher, it tries to kill us all after it's here.

The Source Of So Much Entertainment

I Can Do It, But They Can't Help.

You know the demise of our microwave would lead to stupidity the size of a nuclear mutation that goes on to devour major cities. I expected a new microwave to be expensive, I expected a wait if we ordered one online, but what I never expected was how much worse Home Depot could possibly get.

I don't even remember when our microwave kicked off this mortal coil now, but since the door latch--and in turn the entire unit--broke, dinnertime's been a bitch. It's winter, the windows are maybe 80 years old, there's one baseboard radiator in the entire kitchen/dining room, and keeping anything hot is sort of impossible. That's life, and as long as the oven could warm things, we could do without the microwave a few days. Not really a problem, really. Just an inconvenience.

We were supposed to get like, loads of snow. "Pummeled," the weather people said. I was heading for a week of the palsied insanity I like to call being a woman, anyway, so it was going to be next to impossible to get to Home Depot to look at their microwaves, and Home Depot it would have to be, because that's where I have the card. My only other option was eBay, and I now see that I probably had a better shot at getting a microwave from someone with a feedback of 1 who lived in "The Hong Kongs."

Have I mentioned I hate Home Depot with the fire of ten suns? Yeah. Wasn't crazy about them even before their installers hooked a garden hose to a dishwasher that eventually taught me a valuable lesson in what intestinal explosions must look like.

But I digress. We ordered a microwave. It's pretty, or I think it is. It was inexpensive too, considering it contains magical pixies that can cook things in a few seconds and stuff. Home Depot charged us $55 shipping because a microwave is an appliance. They also charged $22 sales tax because we have a store in our borough, but the microwave is an online only exclusive that must be shipped from a warehouse...not in New York. If that confused you, you are not alone.

The confirmation e-mail I got said someone would be calling the house within 48 hours to confirm the confirmation. By this time the light drizzle we were "pummeled" with had passed, but the order was in, and the microwave was an online exclusive, and my head was detached and laying in a pile of dust under my desk, so we waited.

We got a phone call that said the microwave would arrive in 5-7 days and that I would be getting an e-mail with the exact time and date of delivery.

I got an e-mail, but it only had an order number. I went to the Home Depot website to see if I could put the order number to use. I couldn't even put my e-mail address and password to use, because Home Depot didn't recognize it. This happens every month when I go to pay my bill. I have attempted to sign in 53 times in the past three days. For fun, I tried clicking that I forgot my password, because, you know, maybe I did. What the hell, I've only had it written in my meticulous list of passwords, maybe I'm wrong. Home Depot told me the e-mail address they've been sending my order confirmations to isn't in their system.

I waited a little while before making my next move. This website is obviously smarter than me, and it was enjoying the intimate relations it was having with my brain. Also, Idol was on.

Just now, I went to try again, and this is what I got:



Bastards. They have my money, my microwave, and now my mind. For the extra $77 dollars that was tacked onto the purchase price, we're hoping to have the microwave carried down to the counter. Maybe even plugged in. That's saying it ever gets here.



UPDATE: I was finally able to access the order status online...and was given a phone number to call. I very nearly expected to have to go to a park to make the next phone call, but no, this telephone number finally yielded a delivery date.

January 24th. They'll call the day before to give us a four-hour window (most likely when I won't be available) that the microwave will arrive during. I wonder if I should roll out a red carpet?

It's a tiny little 34-pound microwave!

I could have had one from eBay already. I could have had one from Canada by now...if I walked both ways.

Learn from this kids, if your food can only be prepared in a microwave, and you freeze your bread so it doesn't go moldy because you can always thaw it in the microwave...bad things can happen.

I Can Do It, But They Can't Help.

You Can't See It, It's Electric.

Hey Home Depot! Yeah, I'm talking to you, you big bastards that took over Pergament and Rickel and Channel and basically any place I could have gone ten years ago to buy a lawn mower. Not everyone wants a lawn mower that runs on gas. Not everyone wants a lawn mower they need to sit on to control. Crazy, I know, I mean, what kind of American am I to not want to feel the hum of lawn care at work under my ass on a hot sunny day as I cross my 20x50 yard? Those hedges and rock gardens have it coming to them if I should just drive over them. No, maintaining an engine on something I use once a week ain't my style baby, just ask the car I drive three times a year.

When I perused your online selection of mulching mowers yesterday, I must have hallucinated those four Black & Decker models you had listed alongside the John Deere equipment, because somehow they all disappeared the next day! How can that be? I wasn't able to mow our mushrooms into an inhalable dust, how could I possibly have imagined that you had what I wanted in stock for three hours? What was I comparing? I think I was clicking around on your website, after all, there were huge ads telling me I wouldn't have to pay six months if I used my Home Depot card. Hey, do you know some other mysterious place selling electric mowers is offering to accept payments with the Home Depot card?

Your employees in New Rochelle require instruction as to what department they actually work in, because after the fourth person got on the phone and did not know why they were talking to us, we decided that probably none of them had ever seen a lawn much less a mower. After all, your Bronx staff has never seen a storm door, and don't know why the glass would ever need replacement.

Can it be that in all of the Bronx, Yonkers, and New Rochelle, no one has a lawn that continues to grow until November? Is it just me? Am I the only person who recognizes that grass will continue to grow even after the kids have gone back to school and it's time to stock the snowblowers? What the hell are you trying to pull, Home Depot? You have taken something as simple as purchasing a lawn mower and turned it into the equivalent of walking into Rite Aid and asking for an iron lung. You know what? Even if you did find a mower that runs on electricity, I wouldn't buy it from you now. You have fun selling your emission-spewing tractors to the borough that has the highest rate of mentally handicapped people and the smallest back yards, I'll be giving my money to some .com that'll be out of business by the time I'm ready for my next mower, just like I did last time.

You Can't See It, It's Electric.

We laugh at your puny blizzards!

A while back, someone broke the glass in our storm door.

The recent weather, as most people in the northeastern US will tell you, is getting cooler. Today I thought I'd pop down to Home Depot to pick up a replacement glass for the door, as well as a replacement storm window for the bathroom, because the one room in the house where most people go bare-assed should not be the one room in the house that is the same temperature as the backyard in the middle of January. The whereabouts of the original storm window for the bathroom are unknown. I believe it--along with seven other storm windows--fell victim to the great decrepitude of our previous shed in 1996.

Home Depot took over every local hardware store. We have one place to go for screws, for paint, for wood, for tools, and for soil, by mere absence of choice. Home Depot decides what local residents need for the maintenance of their homes, and you may already be getting a feeling about what Home Depot feels no one in The Bronx needs.

Two guys who are paid to do things at Home Depot were standing in the door and window department. Mum and I approached, and Mum asked where the storm windows were.

The young men's brows creased. They'd obviously never lived in a world where glass broke. "Storm windows?"

"Replacement glass for storm doors, that you change out with the screens," I elaborated.

"We have storm doors, and replacement windows."

I thanked them for their time and started edging towards the Plexiglas.

"Nyack (22 miles away) carries storm windows," one of the men said.

"Okay," I said. I've learned the world doesn't care about my driving customs.

"Poughkeepsie (71 miles away) has them too," the man called.

"Okay," I called from underneath a pile of cracked Plexiglas. The security-grade Plexiglas is about $75, the price of an entire new door before installation costs. The cheaper Plexiglas is just as bloody heavy, and the sheet that we took home was a good three feet taller than me. We plan to render it into the two storm windows we need--I will of course write about the experience at great length.

The two men in the Home Depot aprons standing in the door and window department obviously did not think Mum and I were alluring enough to offer to carry the Plexiglas to the register. Bah, their loss.

We laugh at your puny blizzards!