A Yearly Ritual at Menards

I popped over to Menards hardware store to pick up an item I needed recently. It’s only about a block away; you can see our apartment building in the background of TV ads for the West St Paul store from time to time.

While I was there, I engaged in a ritual I do every year or so.

Once upon a time Alice and I were waiting in line at the customer service desk at the Burnsville Menards when the guy in front of us—apparently a very important customer—started giving the woman behind the counter grief.

“No, you don’t need all that paperwork, I’ll just run those items back to the yard and you can take them there.”

“No, we can’t do that, sir,” she was trying to tell him, but he wasn’t having any of that. He continued berating her in an extremely condescending and arrogant manner.

At one point she bent low to retrieve a form from under the counter, and I could see her lips moving as she muttered words under her breath that one does not find in the Bible.

Well, that’s not entirely true. There is the tale of Baalam’s ass, after all.

Then she left to find a manager, and the man turned to us with an apologetic smile.

“I’m sorry you had to see that, but sometimes these people just need to be put in their place.”

I thought, “Oh, my God, get away from me, you horrible excuse for a human being.”

So I make it a point every year or so to go to the Menards customer service desk and tell them, “Over the years, I’ve seen your people deal with abuse from customers from time to time. I just want to tell you thank you for doing your job.”

I followed up by telling the woman there the above story, which she found enormously amusing, and we were all smiles as we parted.