Pipe Dreams

Photo of white PVC pipes and assorted valves mounted on a light blue cinderblock wall.

There are two people in this household and one of them is very good at home improvement projects and the other one is good at holding things. (And by good I mean that I am marginally okay at best.)

Our basement looks a bit like some sort of live action version of Super Mario Brothers. There’s a wide assortment of pipes and pipe fittings, and Ron has been thinking about pipes pretty much non-stop for the past week. When he needs a second pair of hands, that’s when I’m there to hold something steady or straight.

Mostly I stand around uselessly waiting until a point where my limited skills can be of use. Yesterday while Ron struggled to figure out the best way to get some pipes lined up correctly I watched animals in the yard. They do not seem too troubled by the humans and their shenanigans. While we (and by we I mean Ron) work out on the patio the wildlife go about their business just a few feet away. The deer munch on the grass, a rabbit is convinced that if it doesn’t move a muscle I won’t see it, and a woodpecker wonders if the shed might be hiding any delicacies.

“How important is getting it exact matter?” I ask, as I watch Ron struggle with the piping conundrum, convinced that this might be one of those times when his perfectionism is a hindrance. “It’s extremely important,” he says. So, apparently this particular piping problem is a bit like surface pattern design, I figure, putting it into terms I can understand.

Besides holding things, I put my skills to use by reminding Ron to take breaks and to eat occasionally because if I didn’t he would work right through to 7 p.m. and forget all about eating lunch.

Because of this project we learned that for $7.99 we can have items delivered from our local Home Depot in two hours, and we have made use of this service a few times. Lowes might offer a similar service, but our one next day order from that DIY store didn’t go so smoothly. We ordered a 10 pack of clamps. When I went to retrieve the order from the stoop the bag felt suspiciously light. I opened it to find just one clamp inside. My phone call to Lowe’s didn’t get things resolved. So, a few days later I stopped in at Lowe’s when I was out getting groceries. The women staffing the customer service desk felt like it was impossible for something like this to happen. “The 10-pack is a different sku number than a single clamp,” the woman said to me. Apparently the system should give them an error message if they scan the wrong sku number when they are pulling orders. I didn’t know what to tell her. Before she could process the return she went off to figure out how something like this could have happened, and apparently after some sleuthing determined the employee responsible, and from what I could gather she now understood how this snafu happened. She was able to refund me. Well, sort of. She was able to refund the cost of the clamps. Refunding the $2.99 delivery fee, meant getting someone higher up in the chain of command involved, and they weren’t available. So, yeah we’ve been sticking to Home Depot as well as some local plumbing supply places for the more obscure fittings.

And well, that’s one more way that I’m able to lend a hand. If I’m told exactly what to order, I can buy stuff (and yes I’m aware that there are people employing AI assistants for such tasks) and also I can deal with customer service when there’s an issue with an order, though I have to admit I’m not a huge fan of the AI customer service bots. They don’t seem to be capable of doing much besides wasting my time. Well, I better wrap this up because I’m told my expert assistance will be needed shortly.

—Alissa