Our hardware store caters to many, many senior citizens. As we all know, seniors can be set in their ways, have ideas that are outdated and don't believe inflation is real. That last one is something I struggle with everyday. Old people just don't get why things cost what they do. They mostly remember when things were cheap. We have a young woman in our store who is an expert on the subject of paint and paint-related matters. She has been mixing and selling paint since she graduated from high school a decade ago. She actually likes to paint, an idea completely foreign to Merle Wayne Sneed. This morning I was walking through the store, minding my own business, when an elderly woman hailed me over. She was standing next to our painting expert holding a can of paint. When I walked over she asked, "Is your house brand paint as good as Krylon?" I immediately realized that our expert had probably already told her it was, but she was looking for a man's opinion. I'm not walking into that trap. I asked her what my coworker had said about it? She replied that she had said it was as good. "Well, there's your answer, I told her. She knows much more about paint than me." Old notions die hard. Speaking of senior citizens, an old, old guy came in yesterday asking to buy a three-way lamp socket, some lamp cord and a new plug. He told me that his son had died and he was trying to update a lamp that had belonged to the son. He was trying to fix it as a memento for his wife, the dead man's mother. I got him his parts and drew him a diagram of how to redo the lamp. Off he went. This morning I was paged to the phone and when I answered it, an old woman said, "You sold my husband some lamp parts yesterday and I'm sending him down there with the lamp. He has it apart and cant figure out how to get it back together." An hour later he appeared with the lamp, in parts, in a large sack. He said he worked on it for seven hours, but the more he worked the worse it got. I have to say, it was butt-ugly as lamps go. Putting it together was a challenge because he couldn't remember exactly how it looked assembled, but after a half hour or so, I got it back together and he was very happy. He said that I was going to make an old lady very happy, but I think he was mostly glad that he wouldn't get blamed for ruining the lamp. The boss came by while I was working on it and told me to be sure to charge him for my labor. I felt bad charging him ten bucks for labor, because with parts, he had about twenty bucks into the thing. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky