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Cockpit Delivery - Hell on Earth
By Gene Buckle

Cockpit Delivery

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I get home from work, call "L" and tell him to head over. By the time he gets here all my help will have arrived and we can get this done.

What really happened:

I have to do a 4pm interview (the time I normally leave) with a candidate for IS director (ya, I get to interview my boss) that was *supposed* to happen at 3pm, then it got moved to 2pm, and then 4pm. At 10 to 4, I call L and tell him what is going on and that I'll call him when I get out of the meeting. He says, "ok, no problem". I finally get out the door at 5:10pm and give L a ring. I get an answering machine, so I leave a message telling him to head out about 5:40pm. This will give me time to stop at Home Depot to get some round wooden posts to help roll this thing off the trailer.

3 minutes away from Home Depot, I get a call from my wife telling my that not only is L there, but he's making "I'm going to dump this thing in the driveway pretty soon" noises. Well I skip the Home Depot trip and madly scurry home, getting angrier with each mile. I call in a favor and grab a co-worker and his next door neighbor. By the time I get to the house, Rob already has the back end jacked up and working on getting it off the trailer. Good 'ole L is muttering about "how we can't do this without 6 people"...yah. Whatever. If that pissant hadn't jumped the gun on me, he wouldn't be sitting around *waiting* now would he? Twit. Anyway, the consensus after some heated discussion is that I *still* need to go to Home Despot to get some rolling stock. Pffft. Silly Gene. You *know* better to try to do *anything* at Home Despot while you're in a time crunch. I get there and can I find *anyone* to help me? Ha! They may be open 24 hours a day, but you'd never know it by the number of visible employees during the day. Maybe they're all vampires, waiting to capture hapless contractors with sleep disorders. Humph. I finally track someone down and tell him what I need. "Round?" "Yeah. Round." "How about peeler cores?" "ya! That'll work!" Silly Gene again. The "peeler cores" they sell have been *SHAVED* on two sides to keep them from rolling. What the hell use is a round object if it won't bloody well roll?! Hellooooo?!

After a frantic 30 second search in my head for "Strong things, round and long, plastic no, and has some signficant non-negative chance of actually *being* here", my personal little Master Caution light goes on and I *distinctly* hear a "ding" (maybe the toast is done?) and I come up with "Post, chainlink fence, metal". So I grab my cart and haul ass to where I'd seen the chainlink fence junk just a few minutes earlier. I must take a moment here and compliment whoever designed the lumber carts they use at Home Depot. They're great! When they're empty and you're moving *really* fast they make enough noise to wake up the store manager in his little coffin in the back. It's VERY satisfying when you're in a screaming hurry and pissed off at anything that moves to be able to make that much noise *legitimately*.

I find to my joy, two 8 foot long 16ga steel posts. "Just *spankin'* I mutter to myself. I grab them and race back to the checkstand - making by the way even MORE noise since I've got two 8 foot long steel echo chambers that produce a very satisfying rattle/boom in time with the near epileptic seizures that all the cart wheels are simultaneously having.

I get to the checkstand and make arrangements to have them cut in half. I wait for a minute and nobody shows. "Screw this." I say. I hurriedly pay for these things (10 bucks each?! WTF?!) and race down to where the cutting machine is. Again making enough noise to rattle teeth the whole length of the warehouse. Damn, I *really* like those carts.

I practically snatch this poor HD guy off his feet that had the misfortune of being between me and the pipe cutter. "I need these cut in half, and I need it done yesterday - they're paid for.", I say as I practically stuff my receipt up his nose. What seems like 6 weeks later, Sluggo the Most Inept Pipe Cutter in The Known Universe is done cutting my 8 foot pipes down to size. Not including travel time, this little adventure in consumeristic hell cost me *30* minutes. I strongly suspect that particular Home Despot is populated with people that couldn't hack the fry machine at McDonald's - but I digress....

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