Warning: Nothing in this post should be construed to mean that the Merle Wayne Sneed blog endorses or condones homicide. From time to time in my work in the hardware store, I meet a customer so vile that I actually have a grudging admiration the audacity of their repugnance. How does a sixty-year-old obnoxious shrew reach her seventh decade without someone having killed her? I got a phone call at sevenish this morning from a woman asking if I had a cap for an ice-maker water line on her refrigerator? I told her I did. Then she asked my name and we had a back and forth as she repeated it incorrectly three time. Finally she told me she was on her way and that I should wait by the door. I told her that I was the only guy working in the store until eight-thirty and she would have no trouble finding me. Her response was to repeat my name incorrectly, three times more. Five minutes later, the cashier told me that a woman was looking for me and she was sending her back to the plumbing aisle. The customer and her husband disconnected the water line from their frig so that he could move it out because they were painting. The line continues to drip, even though they turned off the water valve behind the frig. I suppose the husband would have come in himself, except he was probably trying to figure where she hid his testicles. I'm just making a guess based upon the fact that she is still alive and still referring to the guy as "her husband." I asked her where she was trying to cap the line and that set her off. She wanted to know if I even understood the problem. She said that she wanted to cap the line where is was disconnected from the frig. On the frig itself or on the line, I wondered? This question just irritated her more. She asked me how hard this was for me to understand? I'm not kidding. My question was perfectly reasonable, unless you got up on the wrong side of the fiery pit of Hell. When you take the line off the frig, you have a male connection on the frig and a female one on the line. Male connections get capped, females connections get plugged. I went to our brass parts bins and started to look for a plug that she could screw into the end of the line. As I suspected, we didn't have a proper plug. In fact, I'm pretty sure that no one has a plug for a ice-maker line, because plugging the line is the stupid way to do it. The right way to do the job is to disconnect the line from the wall valve and cap the valve off. This is where things really went wrong. Out of the blue she says, "Is this how you operate, you tell people on the phone you have something and then when they come in you look and see if you do?" Have you ever had one of those moments when blood rushes to you eyes and you can't see? This was that moment. My instinct was to tell her to get out, but that is not in my job description. So, I mustered what composure I could and with my vision returning, said, "No madam, that is not what I do. You asked for a cap, not a plug. There's a difference." I used a couple of parts to fashion an adapter that will let her plug the end of the line and sent her on her way, without so much as a thank you. She reciprocated. 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