Garden Follies

by Lois

I couldn't make up this stuff if I tried.

I was working in the gods-forsaken land known as the outside garden area at Home Depot (or, as I like to call it, Hades) and was just getting ready to sign off for the day and go home. This dipshit was at the other cash register, buying a shrub to replace one that he said was dying and he didn't know why. Apparently, he just never has much luck with shrubs and trees. So, the cashier called up Luis, the garden associate, to help the guy and give him tips on how to plant the shrub, fertilize it, etc. He was reading the tag attached to the plant, which the customer could have done himself if he hadn't been such an illiterate fuckwit; and the tag said to plant the shrub no deeper than the top of the root ball.
"How do I know how big the root ball is?"

???

"You have to take it out of the pot," said Luis.

"Oh, you have to take it out? I just put them right in the ground with the pot."

!!!!

I swear, I am not making that up! This doofus was sticking the shrubs into the ground without removing them from the pot first!

Luis: "Do you think that may be why they died?"

The guy seemed genuinely baffled that you have to remove the plastic pot first! OMFG, what an ignorant piece of shit!

And then there was the woman who was upset because there are bees in her flower beds and she wanted to know how to keep them away. Um, bees are attracted to flowers. You plant flowers, you get bees. That's how nature works. Even a child could figure that out--well, no, maybe not. God only knows what the fuck they teach kids in school these days. Apparently, though, she didn't comprehend this simple idea. Bees, to her, are bad, but apparently it's okay to spray your plants with deadly toxins, which can then leach into the soil and kill other good critters like worms, ladybugs, spiders, and praying mantises. I have no sympathy for people who don't understand the simplest of nature's workings and think that all of nature should be perfectly obedient to their unreasonable whims. Stupid cunt. I hope she gets eaten by woodchucks.

Hey, I just thought of something! Maybe she could get together with Shrub-Planting Boy. She could plant plastic flowers (which won't attract bees); he could plant potted shrubs. Then they could take turns pissing on them to see which ones grow the fastest.

People piss me off. Sometimes, it's all I can do to refrain from bitch-slapping every customer who comes through my line, whether they deserve it or not. Hell, they deserve it just for breathing in the same vicinity as me, especially the ones who cannot be bothered to read the labels of anything.

Is this good for roses? Can I use this weed killer in my flower beds? Can I plant this in partial shade? How much of this should I use on my hybiscus? How big does this grow? How many square feet will this lawn seed cover? Am I asking too many questions? Are you insane yet? Why are you fondling that knife and staring at my throat?

FOR SHIT'S SAKE, PEOPLE, READ THE GODDAMNED DIRECTIONS!! Everything you need to know is right there on the fucking label! READ IT! That's why you went to school, right? Gods and devils, what a waste of public funding. We send kids to school for twelve years, force-feed them reams of boring information and outdated facts, and for what? So they can become sucky customers with no more reading ability than a retarded monkey on crack? What the fuck is the point behind a system like that? The result is that people have no ability to find out things for themselves. It would take too much effort to read a label or go to the library, so they ask that the information be spoon-fed to them in tiny, bite-size portions, since anything more would require an ability to THINK.

The worst offenders are the ones who have Internet access. I've had sales people tell me that their customers truly act surprised when they're told they can find what they need to know on their computer. The Internet is so much more than homoerotic pictures of naked wrestling midgets, but God forbid that any customer should use the world's largest source of information--spanning hundreds of countries and every continent on the globe and containing every kind of knowledge imaginable--to actually FIND information.

People are stupid. I hate them all.