James and the not-so-Giant Snowblower

...or as they call them these days, "snow thrower."

After the huge storm that snowed us in on Thursday, we decided it was time to bite the Home Depot credit card and get one of these babies. So we slid over to the crazy shopping plaza (someone on drugs designed the traffic flow at that mall!) and found the last lonely 3 machines on the floor and chose the least expensive one--which was actually the model I wanted anyway, I wasn't just being a cheapskate, although that has been known to happen. We asked one of the equal-opportunity-employed morons if they had any more of this model or if we had to buy the one off the floor, and he told us that what was there was all they had left so just "wheel it over to the checkout!" So we did. Whereupon another of the EOE morons saw that it had 2 different price tags on it and didn't know which to scan, so she called over yet another of the aforesaids who determined it was--can you believe it?!?--the LOWER price. With all that hullaballoo and muckety-muck, neither James nor I thought to ask if the thing came with a user's manual, etc.

So at 7:00 this morning when we tried to fire it up for the first time, we discovered that alas it needs an ignition key. Which was not attached to the machine anywhere. While James resorted to the old-fashioned (well, not actually that old-fashioned since it has a nifty new "ergonomic" design) shovel to start clearing the drive so we could get to church and he could do his job, I went to the internet to get all the proper part numbers and then called Home Depot and talked to yet another of their yahoos who said, "Oh, I'll leave a key at the service desk for you." By the time I got off the phone, our gentlemanly neighbor had taken pity on our poor souls and cleared our whole shared driveway with his Monster Beast Snow Eater, so we were able to make it to church and feel proud to be 2 of the only 25 people who came to any church anywhere in downtown Pittsfield today (all the other churches canceled their services). In one of those wonderful graces of God moments, I offered to sing with the choir to beef up their numbers (which without me equaled 6 today) and the music minister pulled out a replacement anthem--none other than the Harold Darke arrangement of "In the Bleak Midwinter" which I have wanted to sing with a choir for decades!!! Amazing.

Anyway, back to the snowblower. After church, James and I drove back to Home Depot on snowy, salty, sandy, slippery roads to pick up the key which was in fact waiting for us at the service desk as promised. When we got home, we tried to insert it in the ignition only to discover...IT DIDN'T FIT! James went to bed for a disgusted nap, I ate something, and then I called Home Depot and talked with someone who sounded like he knew something about snowblowers but who was obviously just putting on a good show because when we went BACK to Home Depot again to get the user's manual, key, and extension cord he promised us, none of the above were at the desk and the report was, "He's still looking for it." We waited patiently for about 20 minutes, and then increasingly impatiently for another 20 minutes, while "Adam" searched the Lawn & Garden department for the accessories that must have come with the snowblower when it arrived at the store, wouldn't you think? but had apparently disappeared off the face of the earth. When James finally got fed up and hunted Adam down to say, "There must be a key--they wouldn't sell a machine without a key!" Adam's brilliant response was, "Well, that's a corporate decision," as in, Don't get mad at me, man, I'm just a minimum wage peon. To which James replied, "Well, that's a pretty f***ed up policy, don't you think?"

The clincher of the day was when we went back to the Service Desk and explained once again that the key they'd given us earlier today didn't fit--it was much too big. The same EOE moron I'd spoken with on the phone who assured me that they had the right key for our model number finally said, "Oh, you don't have the yellow one? You have the one with the red tone?" (Meaning the red one?) YES! Like I'd told every one all day long! "Oh, well," he says, "that uses an entirely different kind of key." No kidding.

So they gave us 2 other keys, assuring us that one of them would work. Which, thank God, it did. And James cleared our driveway in a fraction of the time it's been taking with the shovel. So we're all set now for the Nor'easter that's blowing in on us as I write this...