DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I bought a small SKB rack for audio gear. It had the rack rails preinstalled, but no screws for mounting components. In search of fitting screws, I went to the local hardware store, carrying a sample rack screw taken from a component that came with its own mounting hardware.

The fastener aisle at this hardware store is either the best or the worst place in the world, depending on my disposition and the size of my hurry. You’ve seen these places: 600 square feet of two-by-four-inch boxes of screws, washers, nuts, bolts, caps, and spacers, in steel, brass, plastic, and stainless. It usually takes me five minutes to find anything, and although I always succeed I was happy to see a member of the sales staff there this time because I was in a rush.

“Can I help you?” he asked. I held out my lone rack screw and said, “Yes. I need 16 more of these.”

“Oh, I’m afraid I don’t have any,” he replied. I thought he was kidding. We were standing amid 5000 different fastener products. He couldn’t possibly know that this particular screw was out of stock. He couldn’t even know what I was holding!

“Err, what do you mean?” I asked after an uncomfortable moment in which he had continued to smile and I had continued to frown.

“That’s enamel coated,” he pointed out with the authoritative tone of someone who knows the minutiae of a stock of 5000 fastener products and is accustomed to quoting it fequently to customers, to people in line at the ATM, and to dinner guests. “We don’t stock those.”

Ah. No matter. “Stainless will be fine,” I said. He took the screw from me and held it up to the light. “That’s metric,” he said. My jaw flopped open. Another joke? “How can you tell?”

“They have a different look. After a while you can just tell.” Note: no, you can’t, as would become evident.

He was chatty. It took him ten minutes to count out 16 of the screws and matching washers. I heard about his family. I heard about his hobbies. I heard that some customers don’t put the screws back into the right compartments when they’re fishing for this or that. Finally I took the baggie of twice-counted parts and jogged to the register, running late but feeling good.

Twenty minutes later I was screaming seven kinds of hell at Mr. Chatty Metric Screw Expert, for these metric screws didn’t fit my rack.

We were due at a friend’s for dinner in an hour or two, but we took an unplanned detour back to the hardware store to prevent my spleen from exploding.

How could I have left the store the first time without testing a metric nut on the rack screw I brought? Only a fool would forget that, and I’m not a fool. Or at least, not a total fool — I let the sales guy test the nut. It fit fine. 5mm metric, or whatever this was, is just a hair bigger than 10/32 standand (or whatever). The metric nuts actually fit, somewhat sloppily, on non-metric screws. The reverse, needless to say, is not the case.

So, after a nice dinner with friends, I returned home and rack-mounted my compressor and powerline conditioner. For a few moments, all was right with the world.

Later, while cleaning up some empty boxes, I found a baggie of 20 rack screws taped inside the lid of the box the rack case had come in.