AT THE HOME DEPOT

I shouldn’t have laughed. But, when I pulled into the parking lot at the Home Depot, it hit me. The first three parking spaces in each row were designated for disabled people. I’m not talking about the first three spaces only. Nope! I’m seeing the first three spaces in all of the rows which must have totaled 12-15. That’s three spaces in each row times 12-15 for a total of at least 36 disabled parking spaces right there up front.

I never park up front. I enjoy walking and I even enjoy more parking away from everyone else so I don’t return to my vehicle suffering numerous door dings from the oversized cars parking in the disabled spaces. What really strikes me is that the only people I ever see parking in these spaces are fat people, not just overweight people either. Shoot, we’re all, almost all, overweight. What I’m talking about is really great big fatty two-by-fours! When they get out of their big cars, it is necessary for them to drive their door as it opens as hard as they can into the car next to them because they need the extra inch that the ding provides in order to get out of their car. Otherwise, there just isn’t enough room.

Is seems there must be a rush of these disabled folks descending on the Home Depot who are all worked into a frenzy re-roofing their homes and doing jobs involving heavy lumber and large appliances. Disability for these large folks does not interfere with doing things other than walking 30 feet into the store.

Once in the store I went to grab a cart, but the darned thing was huge and heavy. Then, I noticed it had a locomotive attached to it. On the surface, this made some sense as many items in the Home Depot are large and heavy. These large turbo powered carts were not to provide for the weight of items, however, these were to carry the significant weight of the folks who needed the assigned parking spaces.

I grabbed a regular cart and wheeled down to the back of the store to grab some cardboard boxes. I’m moving. Just as I tuned into the cardboard box isle, I was blocked by two of these super powered carts. Each cart was occupied by a person who appeared to have had Hippopotamuses transplanted to their asses. They were so wide that the entire isle was blocked and I couldn’t even walk past, let alone maneuver my regular sized cart. Normally, I could get my cart past a large fork lift in this isle. But, (no pun intended), these two people had sets of buns, that’s four buns total, which entirely blocked the isle.

I had no hope of getting to the boxes from this direction so I wheeled the cart around and rolled all the way through the appliance section and attacked the box isle from the other side. However, by the time I arrived, the large people had moved, pulling one in front of the other, and now the entire side of the isle with the boxes was blocked. Sure, I could now push my cart down the isle which I heretofore couldn’t even enter, but now I couldn’t get to the boxes.

I excused myself and indicated I needed to grab a couple of boxes. These two folks turned out to be quite nice and apologized, with the man stating that it was quite a coincidence that they were blocking the only thing I needed to get to. It struck me that they were so big that I could have gone all the way down to the lumber stacks on the other end of the store and they STILL would have been in the way. He started up the locomotive attached to his cart and a giant puff a black diesel fumes poured from his exhaust pipe…actually the cart’s exhaust pipe, not his, thank God! His cart rumbled about five feet down the isle..

Anyway, I grabbed my boxes and left. On the way out of the store, it struck me that these two people had been wearing camouflage pants. (Not both of them wearing the same pants but each having their own set of camouflage pants). What on Earth were they trying to blend in with? I just plain cannot figure any of this out. One thing I do know for sure is that I will never make it a habit of eating potato chips for breakfast. As I approached my truck, I saw a pair of disabled people pulling into one of our regular peoples’ parking spaces. That really burned me up….