Fear Number Three

Usually my fears are irrational. I lay in bed at night trying to convince myself that I am totally insane and should spend less time worry about nonsense. Unfortunately, one of my deployment fears was realized sooner than expected.

Being the fabulous albeit part-time homemaker that I am, I decided to finish landscaping the front garden with some lovely mulch - Fifteen bags of mulch to be exact.

I arrive at Lowes and happily load up my cart. After all, I had gotten an early start to my day. A nice older gentleman offered to help me pull my overflowing cart to the checkout and then, as good Lowes employees do, offered to help me load my car.

How could I turn down an offer like that?

Good customer service turned bad, when the man not only loaded my car, but locked and closed my door as well. My car is of the particular automatic type where locking one door locks all of them. And yes, as I was hauling large amounts of wood chips from my cart to my backseat - my purse was conveniently stored in the front seat of the car - as were my car keys.

It felt as though it was happening in slow motion. I stood there in awe. Seriously. Did that just happen?

So here I am, smelly as can be after working in the yard all morning and foregoing a shower, stranded in the Lowes parking lot with a remorseful old man and not even a dollar for a bottle of water.

I'm pissed. But I am also at the mercy of the Lowes employee at this point. I try to curb the attitude, unsuccessfully at first, when he announced to his fellow employees that I had locked myself out of my car. I had to protect my honor and even if I didn't, my mouth gets the best of me and I spouted out, "No - you locked me out of my car." Clearly he had never tangoed with a smelly blonde wearing over sized Army PT shorts, pink flip-flops and yesterdays make-up.

I pull the sob story: "Well I would call my husband, but he is deployed to Iraq - FOR A YEAR!" Go ahead wallow in it.

Since that did nothing to improve my spirits and surely sunk the Lowes man's, I turned a new leaf. The Lowes man showed me to a rocking bench displayed at the font of the store. He even brought me green tea. And there I sat and sat and sat for nearly two hours waiting for car-pros to come and financially abuse me.

As it turned out, Lowes employees are required to take a one hour mid-shift break. I met all of the Lowes smokers and made some new friends. I even got a suntan on my pasty looking legs.

But most importantly I confronted fear number three. I was stranded without a friend of family member in flying distance to rescue me and I lived to blog about it.