It's 9:55pm and I want to redo my basement

During the week and on Saturdays, Lowe's is open till the unforgivable time of 10pm. I often wonder why people will come to the store at such a late hour to make big and important purchases. It is also suspicious to come in so late and in your cart you have a roll of plastic wrap, a saw, a hatchet, and plenty of bleach.

"Will that be all for you today?"

"Well, until you start selling industrial strength bags with zippers, then yes."

If you want to commit a violent and deadly crime, your big box home improvement stores offer a one stop shop to fulfill your homicidal needs. On a side note, Lowe's sells lye. Tired of your pesky neighbors asking "what's that smell?" and "where's your husband?" Lowe's has the answers.

To get back on topic, one of the largest and most prominent irks are the customers who come into the store when we are near closing time. The parking lot is empty, except for employee cars that are exiled to the back of the lot, the cash registers are being emptied, and the lights are dimmed. These are blatant indicators that the store is shutting down for the evening and your attempts to pick out the perfect granite top for your kitchen can wait till tomorrow. People will dive through the cracked open door as if they were escaping a horde of zombies and their only salvation is on the other side of the slowly closing gate.

The other day I was scheduled to close and I have a very rigid closing schedule. I flat stack all the lumber to make it pretty for tomorrow's first customer to admire for three seconds before they decide that it's too magnificent of a job to allow anyone else the opportunity to enjoy it and promptly destroy my beautification efforts. I sweep the aisles, and mop the concrete aisle. These are all exercises in futility. In addition, the precious pallets of concrete that sit just outside the lumber entrance need brought in with a forklift. Company policy states that before the store opens and after it closes are the only times you can operate power equipment without a spotter. So, to complete that portion of my routine, I must bide my time and wait for 10pm to strike.

At 9:55pm, two men entered my department to buy a considerable amount of drywall, particle board, and everything else you can imagine would be needed to completely remodel a basement. I have to help these two grown adults lift objects onto carts. They are in their thirties I assumed, and sketchy looking I knew. The load up their supplies for a long night and make my night that much longer as well. I pace like a caged lion, eyeing its prey. My sights are set on the forklift which I will leap onto once they leave. But they don't leave. Everything's going wrong and I'm losing control. My routine is thrown into disarray because the one guy is basically illiterate.

He doesn't read his receipt, he examines it. Last I checked, the receipt does not print out in Sumerian cuneiform. Nor does it print out in Latin or Hieroglyphics. He asks question after question, "What does this mean?" Meanwhile, his friend goes outside to load up their stuff.

At this point it's 10:15, I wanted to get out of work by 10:30. Finally, the cashier manages to get rid of this guy and I open the gate to drive the forklift out. Outside, in the middle is a solitary bag of concrete that could not have just fallen off of a pallet. It all made sense in that moment. The 'illiterate' one was tying us up while his friend loaded who knows how many bags of concrete into their vehicle. By now they were high-fiving each other on a job well as they turned onto the highway and there was nothing I could do. The make things worse, the forklift ran out of fuel just as I lurched it outside, just to add insult to injury. I nearly blow myself up putting another tank of propane on the forklift. I was soundly beaten and out-smarted by these two con men. I hope their basement collapses on them at 3am.