Damn you Jerry's!

When checking out tonight with everything I thought I needed to hang a door, the clerk couldn't find the code on the header jamb. "What department did you get this in, I'll call over."

"Moulding." I said.

Blank stare. "What department? Like doors and windows? Hardware?"

"Moulding. You know, trim and baseboards and stuff."

Blank stare.

"It's a door jamb." I say, pointing to the computer.

She types in "DOOR JAM"

Nothing comes up.

"They're all part of the same thing. One's the left side, the other's the right. They should have similar numbers. They were all sitting next to each other in the moulding aisle."

"Sir, I'm trying to help you. There's no such department."

She gave me the hand and got another checker.

"It's from millwork. It's a jamb header. Primed. Interior. 4 and 11/16ths." She then looks up the missing piece and rings it in. 3 or 4 keystrokes total. I notice the new checker is a little butch. The original one is sort of a cutesy high school girl.

She looks at the computer, then at the two sides. "Hey, you know you've got two left sides there. I'll call back and have them bring up a right sided one."

A guy (the same one that said to me a little while earlier: "You've been in this aisle so long you're getting a little mouldy." Maybe that's why I couldn't come up with the word millwork.) comes up a minute later. "804." "Right, we've got 2 803s." We trade pieces. They send me on my way.

"Should be a lot easier to hang that door now," the butch cashier says.

Thanks a lot. Until I cut the first piece tonight, slide two shims in, drive a nail and hang a plumb bob. "This is a piece of cake," I'm thinking. Hanging a door the first time I did it was an incredible pain. Watching Kramer do it a few times back in Chicago gave me a clue.

I measure the second space, transfer the measurement to the opposite jamb and cut it. I'm five feet away from the doorway when I realize the punster put a duplicate in my hand. I pull the first piece off. Sure enough: they're numbered wrong. They are the same piece, but with different numbers. FUCK!

Now the thing about Jerry's is, a similar thing happened a couple weeks ago with a plumbing part. A teenage guy put the piece in my hand and it didn't fit. I went back, semi-furious, and picked the old, worn out piece out of the garbage can they conveniently have in the aisle. A nice, (sorry, but I'm judging the book by its cover) extremely butch, woman spent 10 minutes completely stymied by the piece. I thought at one point she was going to have to smoke a cigarette and sit down and think about it. It turns out to be a completely non-standard, threaded differently on either end. It took about 20 minutes, but she set me up.

The moral of the story? You can only trust the lesbians at Jerry's.