Patience Is A Virtue- For Someone Else

Impatient and middle aged. Not a great combo. I went to Lowes to return the three five gallon water jugs that had been rolling around in my trunk for about a month. I didn't have a lot of time, so I grabbed the jugs, my pocket book and raced into the Lowes. I grabbed the spray can of polyurethane I had been asked to pick up and went to wait in line. The clerk looks at the three empty five gallon jugs and says: "you can take those outside to the water bottle return area." I said: "oh, this is new." The clerk explained that this had been the procedure as long as she had been there. I did not argue with her. But I knew she had only been there a week or two since I had never been told about this procedure in the past. So I paid for the spray paint and rolled my jugs out to the high tech return center. I pushed the bottles one at a time through foam rubber tube and watched my jugs hit the concrete floor of the fenced in area. I waited for the electronic ticket to zoom out of the ticket retrieval slot. I waited. I kept waiting. No ticket. I wheeled my cart back into the Lowes and asked the return guy to tell me what now since the plan failed. He said: "oh, you can return those to the cashier and she can credit you." So I wheeled my cart back to the clerk and said: "The machine is not working." I stood there and waited while she looked for the bar code in her bar code book. Of course, the bar code was not in there. So the very pregnant clerk who had been watching this whole exchange waddles over with her code book and together, they figured it out. I figure things like this happen to me because I am the most impatient person in the universe and I need to learn patience. I guess I need to keep learning 'cause it didn't get any better today.