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Originally Posted by BigV
take it to a *local* hardware store, where you can talk to somebody who knows what they're doing. this may or may not be the borg (derogatory comment on megahugebigboxhardwarestore). buy what they tell you.
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Great advice. Great advice. I had a recent situation, which I won't bother you with the details of, but suffice it to say: I wanted to hook a dishwasher up to the plumbing where a clothes washer once was. So I needed to reduce from male 1/2" something on this end to something like 5/8" something on the other end. Seems like a simple task: get me from here to there. It's water. It needs to come out here, and go in there. How hard could that be?
BigBorgBox has a convenient huge wall of plumbing widgets, so I need, what would you think, probably two adapters and a hose of some kind. I swear to God I looked at those widgets for at least an hour (I had my brother with me, too; he's a maintenence supervisor, and I used to work for a plumber). Eventually we settled on the "universal adapter hose" and the one additional widget we needed, which they didn't have in stock. We go to find an employee, and maybe thirty minutes and some vague logic pretzel later, we have someone dialing another store, and handing
me the phone, so that
I can ask if they have the part in stock, but they ask me for all these internal numbers, which I have to ask the employee, so after we do that for a while they get on the phone (to do their job, wow), and find the part, across town. I am to meet a certain guy at a certain store and he will have my part.
I go to the store. He has the wrong part (the exact opposite male/female combination: useless). Incidentally I know this guy: he used to be the bartender at a local dive. Now he is serving up wrong parts. Back to the phone. Back to the part search, they have one maybe an hour away.
I abandon this vendor, and go to a second BigBorgBox chain: new wall of widgets, new game plan, new not-having-the-part-I-need.
Back to the other BigBorgBox, how else can I do it, new game plan, many, many unnecessary adapter to recude from one size to another, and when I get home, they don't work, somehow. Back to the BigBorgBox, returning parts.
New game plan, new not-having-it. Returning everything.
This is the punchline: I go to the local hardware store. Five minutes later I have the parts I need, in my hand.
It really was a simple job after all, just like I knew all long.