a great big pile of dirt

Haven't been to Home Depot in awhile, and today I needed to go there to buy dirt. Yup, dirt. And lots of it. Seventy-five cubic feet of dirt and seventy-five cubic feet of lava rock. We're planting some gardens at one of the nursing homes I work at, and since they are raised up high for wheelchairs, they require a lot of dirt.

So there I was, shopping for dirt.

And you would think (at least I would think) that the nice people at Home Depot would make it easy for the average consumer to purchase large quantities of dirt.

But no, not so much.

I found the dirt with no trouble. They have lots of it, in fact. And the rocks, too. My next task was getting it out of the store and into my borrowed pickup truck. And this task would prove to be my undoing.

There are vast hordes of people in Home Depot wearing orange aprons. I soon identified them as store personnel, willing and eager to help me with my earthy purchase. But when I tried to get help from one of them, I felt like the ugly kid at a sixth grade dance, left to sit in a folding chair along the gymnasium wall while everyone else made out under the disco ball. Every single one of them was busy with another customer.

At one point, I found a somewhat-orange person, presumably some kind of floor manager, and asked him for help with my dirt. He suggested I use a regular shopping cart (it would have taken about nineteen of them, by the way) then find "one of the guys in the orange shirts" to help me load the bags of dirt into my truck.

Orange shirt it would have to be. So I waited. And paced. And hung around. And kept looking. Finally, I found one. Timmy.

A tall, muscular young man, Timmy had his name scrawled all over his baseball cap and orange shirt. For every question I asked, he seemed to need to think about it for a very long time, working it over in his head. For a moment, I thought about trying to find someone else, but thought better of it. If Timmy was supposed to be my orange-shirted savior, then so be it.

In the end, he and I figured out that a pallet jack would be the best compromise for the task, and we worked together to load and unload everything.

And you know what? Sure, it probably took longer with Timmy. And I had to do a lot more work than I might have otherwise. But Timmy never once hesitated when it came to helping me. And he followed through all the way to the end. Not one other person in that store cared half that much.

So thanks, Timmy. Can't say I had a great time at Home Depot, but you made the adventure a little more bearable.

And now I have a big pile of dirt.

Posted: Wed - April 28, 2004 at 11:21 PM

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a great big pile of dirt

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