Home Depot 2- A Knobs for Noobs Companion.

13 Nov

from August 1, 2007

For those of you who were smart enough not to read “Knobs for Noobs,” and frankly, good for you, a quick recap: After a fruitless yet epic search for a replacement air conditioner knob, which took me such exotic locales as Boro Park, where a man ate dinner from a dusty hot plate, to New Jersey, where I bought a “shhnurgenshtein” in the Swedish heaven called IKEA. I was finally forced to order a knob at a stupidly inflated price from GE. That blog featured an extended description of my lifelong frustration with Home Depot. An excerpt follows:

Despite owning the reputation of having everything anyone could possibly need to put in a tub, sod a lawn, or furnish a castle, I had trouble there a few years back finding some hex screws. On another occasion I could not buy their advertised drill because, as explained by an associate, “it doesn’t exist.”

For those of you who have never been to a Home Depot, congratulations! Home Depot is one of those huge mega-warehouse hardware stores that is supposed to be your one-stop shop for anything in your home, be it paint, planks, or pliers. It has power saws and sanders. It has garden soil and planters. It has primer and stain. You could go into any Home Depot store and leave with anything for your home except an actual house, but if you want to live in a tool shed, they can supply your home too. Or so they say. I have found Home Depot to be lacking in pretty much whatever I have needed. And I’m talking about simple stuff, like nails or toilet seats. (Not to mention air conditioner knobs. But that was another story.)

Well, as this episode begins, I found myself in the strange predicament of being locked inside my apartment the other night. I’d been locked out before, but this was new. I was inside with no way to get out. I have a very expensive and secure lock on my front door. It has a very unusually-shaped key and is guaranteed to be impossible to open except by that key. In fact, the keys are uncopyable and have to be registered with the locksmith. So if my home is ever burgled, I am going straight to the police with the name of my locksmith, since he must be the one who broke in. The lock is great, but the doorknob was original equipment with the door and had been going bad for a few weeks. It would spin on the axle and not catch until I tightened the little screws on the side, and they were starting to strip. I put off replacing it because, well, that’s usually what I do. (Other than writing blogs where I review movies. Have you read my Ratatouille review? Neither did I.)

On this night, as I was on my way out to an exciting and amazing destination (Waldbaum’s to buy some fruit) the door knob just came off in my hand. The door stayed shut, I had the knob and a stupid look on my face. “Uh.” Thanks to my special lock, if I were on the other side of the door, I could easily have gotten in to the apartment with the key, no knob required. Getting out, however, needed the knob. See why the lock is so special?

I got a long-handled screwdriver and used all of the skills I picked up in my years as a carjacker to jimmy open the catch through the little space between the door and jamb (and no, this doesn’t render the lock useless, this can only be done from the inside) and popped the door open. I cancelled my vital plans to buy oranges and knew that I had to replace the knob or once I came back I might never get out again. It was nine at night and only one place was open, Hells’ Depot. I mean Home Depot, again in search of a knob.

A little bit of back story here. I had just slightly twisted my right ankle for the 12th or 13th time in my life and it was a little sore. High on my left hip I had a small insect bite which had become infected and painful to a degree that I wouldn’t inflict on Jolanta Rohloff or Rick Mangone.  Consequently, walking was uncomfortable for me. Not bad, not painful, but uncomfortable since any pressure on either leg was a problem. And if there is one thing you do in Home Depot, it is walk, because the place is as big as a TWA aircraft hanger, but with worse customer assistance.

I approached the store the way you I imagine soldiers in Viet Nam approached a stretch of dark woods. Cautiously, not knowing what it held, I slowly neared the store. Steely eyed and resolute, I nodded when the greeter did his thing. (And why does Home Depot need a greeter anyway? If I want a guy in filthy overalls to say “hi” to me I’ll go to the dump.) This was to be the last intelligent human contact I had inside the store. I would have a load of non-intelligent contact soon enough.

Home Depot (HD from now on because I’m lazy) at nine on a Friday night is not a happening place. On Saturday night, date night, the aisles are filled with young lovers, but on Friday the place had a few moms and toddlers looking for mops, some guys buying sheets of plywood, a few people pushing carts filled with power tools (and Homeland Security should really see who is buying power drills and big bags of fertilizer) and me, on my mission.

When you enter HD, you are facing the cleaning supplies. To your left is the garden center, to the right is the bulk of the beast. I turned right.

All the aisles are cleverly labeled with such helpful signs as “tools” and “nuts,” so I at least got a good chuckle there.

So I walked and walked and walked to the other end, past appliances, through paint and wallpaper, to the lumber section, in which it is possible to purchase bags of sawdust. That’s the stuff that gets swept up and thrown out at the end of a job. I assume it is there so that someone could spread it all over their floor and pretend to have been working really hard building that patio deck when they’ve actually been drinking beer and looking at their Jessica Alba calendars. (And yes, I do know why they sell sawdust. I’m no fool. They sell it to spread on the floors of western steakhouses.) You may have noticed that I have just walked end to end without finding the doorknobs.

The first thing to do was find someone to ask. This is easier said than done because, in a store the size of a city block, there are maybe three employees. The guy at the door, someone in a red vest who always seems to be at the opposite end of the store no matter where you might be, and the guy I asked. In my defense, he looked like he knew what he was doing. He had a price gun and was carrying a ruler. But of course, the answer I got was “back there, I think.”

My first instinct was to hit him with something solid. My second instinct was to just walk away. I briefly thought about asking “back there where?” but my better judgment kicked in. I said “Phhhpt” and walked, now a little more uncomfortably, to where I believed, logically, they should be. I studied the flow of the store. I noted where the plumbing section led to the appliances and then led to the tools. After a few seconds of inspection, I said to myself “aisle twenty,” and that’s where they were. (And before you ask, no, the signage did not help at all.)

Now don’t think it was that easy. Although I was in the right aisle, I still had to hunt through all the stuff I didn’t want to find what I did. And then it was still harder because they had only four sets of knobs. Four in this whole city-sized place. And they were all dented.

Dented! Every single one of them, in every set of two, was dented. I held them all up to the light. Some were small dings, some were big holes. I picked the least dinged of them on the theory that A- I really need this to get out of my house, B- I could replace them later, and C- if I could manage to find a manager, I could complain. Now I knew that C was impossible and B wouldn’t happen because I’m lazy, but A was very compelling so I set out to find a cashier.

They actually had a cashier working, and I have to admit that this cashier was working hard. Good thing too, because she was the ONLY cashier and the line was anywhere from 8 to 45 people deep. I couldn’t really tell how many there were because they weren’t in a line, they were clustered around the cashier and complaining about how she was the only cashier and why didn’t she open another line and why didn’t she work faster and where was the manager and why was there only one cashier and where were the lawnmowers and on and on and on. Plus everyone had either a wagon filled with stuff or a flatbed filled with lumber.

I had doorknobs. So I went to the self-checkout.

Self-checkout is a scam. Part of what you pay for anything goes to pay the salary of the employees who ring you up. If I am going to ring up myself, and the store doesn’t need to pay someone to do it for me, I want a rebate. After all, the store is getting to save money by making me do the work. The same goes for when you bag yourself at the supermarket, but I make an exception there so my groceries will be bagged competently. Fast food places do the same thing when they give you the cup and you fill your own soda, but you can get over by getting refills. (But since soda is the biggest moneymaker in all of food service, this really is a hollow victory. McDonald’s, for example, pays less than ½ cent for the soda for which you paid $1.49. Soda is nearly all profit in food retail.) In general, there is a trend in retail to get the customer to do more of the work, thereby saving the company money. These savings are never passed on to you, and they are designed to make you think you are getting faster checkout, or convenience, or whatever, but in the end you still pay for services you don’t get.

But if I wanted to get out of HD before I died, or before I killed someone with a Dremel roto-tiller, I need to leave. Self-checkout had a line slightly smaller than the regular checkout, but slightly slower, so it was a wash.

When I finally got out of HD, sometime early Saturday afternoon, I went home and put the knob on the door.

Fit like a glove.

I would like to say that I will never go to Home Depot again. I’d like to tell you that I have managed to get it out of my life. But history shows that I am doomed to forever go back again, and again. Home Depot still beckons me, like some Lovecraftian phantom, lurking on the threshold of my sanity. I pray that I have the strength to resist.

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My Review of Ratatoo, Ratootoo, whatever.

13 Nov

from July 29, 2007

Disney’s Ratatouille is an animated film about disease carrying vermin that prepare some of the finest food in France. Which is about right.

What is ratatouille, the food? I don’t know. My grandmother used to love ratatouille. It looked like a mess with tomatoes and I wouldn’t touch it. She also loved heavenly hash ice cream and I don’t even know if they make it anymore. I was convinced that heavenly hash was the stuff they scraped out of the bottoms of the vats of other ice cream flavors. Maybe one day it had pecans. Another day it was mostly strawberry. It was just a scam to sell their leftover ice cream. Grandma also made us eat her meatballs. Whenever the family got together for a holiday dinner she would, no matter what else she made, make us meatballs. They were, I think, some sort of Swedish meatballs. They were small gray things in a thin gray sauce. I assume it was beef, but it didn’t look appetizing like, say, a Kobe steak. If gray has a taste, this was it. I don’t want to give the impression that grandma was a bad cook, but it was what it was. When he was very young my brother, in a fit of love, or politeness, or maybe out of a mental disorder brought on by gastric distress from gray meatballs, declared, right at the dinner table in full earshot of all his horrified relatives, that he loved the meatballs. You could have heard a pin drop. We hated them! Grandma beamed. And from that day forward we were forced to forever eat her meatballs. What usually happened was that Dave would eat most of the meatballs and everyone else would make some excuse like “I filled up on rice,” or “I had meatballs for lunch” or “I ate three when you were in the kitchen.” I’d force down one or two because as the years went by, although the meatballs didn’t get better, I built up a tolerance for them, like you would if you took a small amount of arsenic every day. The meatball recipe died with my grandmother, immediately making her death look like a suspicious homicide.

So Disney made a film out of what was to me a weird and obscure food, and a rat,  and put Patton Oswalt in the starring role. It is a dream match because Patton Oswalt is a weird and obscure actor who, coincidentally, looks like a rat, thus making him a perfect, PETA-friendly choice for this film. It was also a cost-saving move for Disney: they didn’t have to animate him. That’s him on the screen!

Disney has an affinity for rodents. Mickey Mouse has been long been a hero to laboratory test mice everywhere. Poor little furry fellers. Every day they scamper around their cages, just waiting for their casting agents to call, maybe they got the gig in Disneyland, but no. Those anti-animal scientists scoop them out and perform their evil and unethical experiments on them, like trying to cure cancer or find an AIDS vaccine, and all the while their casting agents can’t get them on the phone because all the animal rights activists are clogging the lines to yell about animal cruelty. Cruelty? They’re the ones keeping those little guys out of Hollywood!

Rats are not nearly as cute as mice, but Disney sort of glossed over all the bad stuff, like carrying the bubonic plague and wiping out half of Europe, in order to make this movie. (In all fairness, I should point out that Disney had nothing whatsoever to do with this film. It is a Pixar release. But I like to make fun of Disney and so I’ll keep on incorrectly calling it a Disney film. Trust me- this way I can do a joke about Walt Disney’s frozen head a little later on.)

Patton Oswalt plays a rat named Frenchie Bordot, or maybe Robespierre J. Rat, I think. I didn’t quite catch it, I was munching on popcorn and trying not to think of all the rats who were really running around the theater and might have been traipsing through the popcorn popper. Unlike every other single rat in existence, Frenchie Bordot didn’t like to eat trash. He didn’t run around in tenements. He was even fussier than that rat in Charlotte’s Web, voiced by Paul “Center Square” Lynde. Frenchie Bordot had fallen in love with a television chef hawking his own brand of steak knives on an infomercial and would only eat food smothered in fatty French sauces.

The chef died and appeared as a ghost only Frenchie could see. It was kind of like the Ghost and Mrs. Muir if the ghost was an obese guy with a cholesterol count of 1650 and Mrs. Muir was a member of the genus rattus.  Frenchie would scamper into the home of a very unclean woman and eat her food, watch the chef on her television, and, disgustingly, lick her face just for laughs. The woman eventually realized that it was a rat kissing her and not her lover from World War One finally come back and she took out a handy shotgun and killed Frenchie. Well, it was a close thing. After Frenchie had a near-death experience and didn’t go toward the light, the ghost of Chef Tony brought him back to fulfil his destiny- living in the sewers of Paris as a Phantom of the Opera impersonator.

For a while it was a great life. Frenchie Bordot wore a cape and played the piano below the Paris opera house. He laughed maniacally and scampered up the aisles in his mask, scaring the patrons until the management brought in a cat and Frenchie fled. Tired and hungry, the ghost of Chef Tony led Frenchie to the restaurant he used to own, now run by a tiny little Hitler-type.

Short Hitler was planning to stick Chef Tony’s face on everything and market the hell out him. (Clearly, this was a Disney metaphor.) Chef Tony fish sticks. Chef Tony curry balls. Chef Tony finger-lickin’ good not copyright infringed fried chicken. Even Chef Tony laxative was ready to run, so to speak. The little nasty guy was about to become filthy rich. Or maybe just filthier. He already looked a little greasy.

Well, out of the blue came cliché plot device number 79: Chef Tony’s illegitimate son who was the real heir to the Chef Tony fortune. It turned out that Chef Tony had gone to a culinary convention in Detroit some years ago. He got drunk one night with some Omaha Steak salesmen and woke up to find himself in bed with a German sous chef named Olga. Since France and Germany haven’t gotten along so well since WWII, Chef Tony, being a patriot, split, leaving only a ten-spot on the nightstand. He had no idea he had a son. All that he knew he got out of the one night stand was a strange rash, but a son he had indeed.

Of course, the son had no idea he was Chef Tony’s son. He thought Walter Cronkite was his father and, trying to impress Dad, blundered into the kitchen one night with the intention of getting a job and uncovering the unfair labor practices of hiring illegal Mexican immigrants in the kitchen. In fact, the only people who knew about his real paternity were: A- short greasy Hitler, B- the rat who could somehow read English despite being a French mouse, and C- the whole audience, who figured out the whole plot and saw the resolution coming a mile away about fifteen minutes back.

Chef Tony Jr. totally screwed up everything. He wrung out his mop in the soup. He mixed up carrots and sausages. He sneezed in the hollandaise sauce. Worst of all, he served red wine with fish. (Hey, this is France, they take that stuff seriously!) Frenchie Bordot watched all of this in disgust. Egged on by the ghost of his dead gay crush, Frenchie jumped on Junior’s head and tried to kill him by gnawing his brain out. Strangely, this didn’t work. Rather, it seemed that Frenchie had gnawed his way through a few synapses and made the son easily susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. Frenchie learned that if he tugged on the son’s hair just the right way, he could make him do whatever he wanted. In one hilarious scene, Frenchie Bordot made the son drop his pants and moon a group of British tourists.

Soon, Frenchie and Junior had become an unbeatable culinary team. Together, they served a new kind of soup flambé that turned the food world on its ear. Within minutes, word spread and every rich snob wanted reservations. Paris Hilton had reserved a table for two but was arrested just before she ordered hors devours.

While the little greasy Hitler guy worried that the son would discover “who’s your daddy?”, the restaurant had attracted the attention of the most influential food critic in France, played by Emperor Palpatine of Star Wars fame. Tall, bony, cloaked in pure evil (and a black cloak), the Emperor was determined to use his Dark Side journalism to ruin the restaurant and make Chef Tony his new Dark Lord of the French Cuisine Sith. This was perfect casting.

Sort of lost in the shuffle was the tough as nails lesbian assistant chef whom Tony Junior fell in love with. Despite the fact that she did little but belittle and hurt him, (or maybe because of that) Tony Junior was wowed by her. She responded by pulling some of the clever pranks that professional chefs often do in the kitchen, like throwing a meat clever at him, spiking his Beef Bolognese with ex-lax and, just for laughs, locking him overnight in the meat-locker with Walt Disney’s frozen head.

Well, the lines of dramatic tension were perfectly set. Would Frenchie Bordot become a famous chef, with Tony Junior as his puppet? Would little tiny greasy short Hitler steal the restaurant from Chef Tony Junior? Would Tony Junior find love with the lesbian? Would Frenchie Bordot find real love with the ghost of the dead Chef Tony? Would Emperor Palpatine turn Tony Junior to the Dark Side and open up that rotating Death Star Café he’s been planning? And what about Frenchie Bordot’s family, whom I haven’t mentioned yet but were a big part of the movie all along?

Shockingly, everything happened just as you might have expected it. Chef Tony Junior and Frenchie Bordot fell in love and ran away to Canada, where it is legal to marry a rodent. Olga, Chef Tony’s one night stand, returned and fell in love with the lesbian, being a little bit of a lesbian herself. Little tiny etc etc Hitler got the restaurant, but died in the kitchen when he ironically fell into an oven. Emperor Palpatine did not manage to convert Chef Tony Junior to the Dark Side, but he found a new apprentice when Chef Gordon Ramsey from FOX TV’s Hells’ Kitchen joined him. Together they opened the rotating Death Star Café, but it was closed shortly thereafter when rebellion health inspectors found evidence of Tatooine sand weevils in the salad.

So there you have it. Ratatouille exceeded my expectations, which were quite low to begin with. It really opened my eyes to the fascinating world of food all around me. For example, were the rats running around that Taco Bell they closed in the city really vermin, or were they also genius chefs? Is it possible that the board of health is wrong and I don’t have to wash my hands after going to the bathroom and before handling food? Could it be that Patton Oswalt is going to get an Oscar for his tender and touching portrayal? The answers are all no.

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