We Should Have Went To Home Depot - How Dave Loses His Battle To Buy A Pillow

Remember that scene from Old School where Will Ferrell’s character says, “We’re gonna go to Home Depot, buy some wall paper, get some flooring.  Stuff like that.  Maybe Bed Bath and Beyond.”  Remember that?  And how funny it was?  Well, it’s not so funny when you find yourself at a Bed Bath and Beyond with your wife.  And it’s really not so funny when you find yourself there because you said, “I need a new pillow.”

So, on a blazingly hot afternoon, we strolled into the air conditioned and well lit confines of our local BBB.  And just like you can’t get just one lap dance, neither can you go into BBB and just purchase one thing.  Apparently, we needed a new dish rack.  I say, “apparently” because I had no idea there was a problem with our old one.  It seemed perfectly capable of performing its sole task, holding dishes.  But Bonnie insisted that though it did indeed hold dishes sufficiently, it was becoming moldy.  (Guys are just awful at recognizing this sort of thing.)

“I want to get another bamboo one,” she said, “I like bamboo, they just get funky after a while.”

Being a guy and what I consider a voice of reason, I said, “Well, why don’t we get one of these wire kind?”

I can’t express how quickly the next sentence came out of Bonnie’s mouth.  As soon as I enunciated the “nd” in “kind” she said, “I want bamboo.”  She did not at all express this in a way that was terse, rather, it was stated in a way that sounded like, “Your opinion is not at all welcome.”  So we compromised – and got the bamboo.

Bamboo dish rack in hand (and pillow nowhere in sight), we now were looking at wine glasses.  There is something to be said for a beautiful crystal wine glass.  Usually it’s, “Damn!  I just broke that beautiful crystal wine glass.”  Bonnie and I drink a lot of wine and we usually get so drunk we are always breaking the glasses.  I jest.  We were looking for something somewhat elegant that also had the durability of Tupperware.  Or, the four glasses for ten dollars.

Finally, after we passed the Soda Stream machine and the griddle that allows you to cook 300 pancakes at once, we arrived at the pillow section.  It was here that I broke down.  I have about a five-minute window in any one store where I can function like a human.  After the five-minute mark, my sole desire is to run like the building is on fire.  And now, here we were at an entire section of pillows.  Different sizes, different material, different whatever it is you use to describe how hard or soft it is.  It was fucking overwhelming.  And the prices?  Everything from $15 to $80. 

Sensing this was going downhill faster than an Obama fundraiser at the NRA, Bonnie said, “You really should get something.  It will help you sleep.”  I felt like saying, “Do any of these say, ‘cure for neurosis?’”  Instead, I said, “I don’t know what I want, let’s just go.”

We left BBB with a dish rack (that I didn’t know we needed) and wine glasses (that have a shelf life of about two months.)  We didn’t leave with a pillow (my own fault – see above comment about neurosis and add anxiety and despair).  Will Ferrell said he and his wife were going to go to BBB, “if they had time.”  I wish we didn’t.