True Story (you can tell ‘cause it’s kind of boring)

Ok, so I’m in the local home improvement superstore the other week, buying some linoleum flooring for my finished basement. As the clerk is measuring out my linoleum, a guy asks her, “is this stuff like liquid nail?” pointing to a bucket of carpet adhesive.

The clerk, looking perplexed, asks him, “what?”

The guy says. “Is this stuff the same as liquid nail?”

The clerk says “Well… it’s an adhesive.” At this point, I was wondering, what the fellow was driving at.

Then, the guy says “I’m doing a job on a commercial building, and I want to put a texture on the siding. Will this stuff work?”

“You mean, on the outside?”

“Yeah.”

At this point, the situation became clear: This fellow has evidently used liquid nail as some kind of ultra hard stucco-like texturing, and is realizing that it’s gonna get expensive using all that liquid nail to finish his job. He saw the buckets of carpet adhesive that were much cheaper and thought, “Hey, there’s something I can use.”

The clerk said, “uhh…well…That’s not what it’s for. It’s for sticking carpet to floors. I don’t know if it will hold up outside.”

The clerk and I exchanged a glance, saying to each other “this fucker is definitely not all there, and he’s probably not dangerous, but let’s not laugh out loud until he’s safely out of this aisle.”

Anyway, the guy loads up a couple of buckets of the carpet adhesive onto his cart, apparently to go apply as texturing to an exterior wall.

After he left, the clerk apologized to me for the delay. I said “it’s okay. It was amusing.” We laughed and talked a bit about it, saying that he’d be coming back in a couple of months saying how the crumbling wall was the store’s fault. Perhaps there’d be smokers stuck against the wall after leaning against it on a rainy day. Maybe chunks will fall off every time the door closes.

I can imagine what the owner of the building must be like, taking the lowest bid from this clown, thinking he’s saving money, when all he’s gonna be getting is a big-ass headache.

So, dear readers, what is the moral of this story?