Shopping at hardware store

I had to share this experience because it made me laugh and shake my head.

I have been waiting to trim my apple tree until it was a tad warmer outside, dreading climbing the thing and snipping off every tall spiky limb with my loppers. Last year my arms hurt for three weeks afterward.

This year, a friend of mine recommended I go get a limb saw. I wasn't exactly hot on the idea for the pur fact that the last time I tried to use a saw it did nothing but frustrate me. But what the heck.

I stopped at Home Depot on the way home from breakfast to check out a limb saw. I, of course, walked into the store and went to completely the wrong section (TOOLS) then asked a Home Depot person for directions. He walked me down to the aisle, located the limb saws and pulled one out.

Then he turned to me and said, "Is this what he was looking for?"

He? He who? Was I not standing there asking for this tool?

I replied, "The saw is for me. I'll be the one using it and climbing up in the tree to saw some limbs."

The look on this poor man's face when he realized his mistake was one of slack jaw, wide eyes, and pink cheeks.

"I'm sorry. That really was a stupid thing to say," he offered.

I gave a small laugh and smiled. "No problem. Happens all the time."

The sad part is that it really does happen all the time. If you're buying a tool you must be buying it for a man to use. Now, you're talking to a woman who has framed a wall, put up sheet rock, hung cupboards, replaced light fixtures and switches, painted every wall in her house, gutted and re-planted her own garden, built her own walking trail with more than 400 pounds of flagstone.

You should see the horrified look on the guy at the stone yard's face when I stick the flagstone and rock in the trunk of my BMW. It's similar to the young guy's faces at the nursery when I shove dirty plants in the truck. I have to explain to them, "It's just a car." Then they stutter and I laugh.

Oops! Back to the story.

Anyway, why does the fact that a woman wants to buy a tool surprise so many male salespeople?

Honestly, my ex-husband who is wicked smart when it comes to computers couldn't put together a desk without assembling it backwards, nor could he change a light switch. His version of a tool is a wire crimper for CAT-5 cabling and a mini-screwdriver for all those tiny screws on the cases of computers.