How will you ever know if the reason for that silly paint mix-up was merely asinine?
It’s quite possible the truth will blow your mind…
“Hey, listen up, Koko,1I can’t remember her name, but it was something along the lines of being borderline ridiculous I was just in there buying paint from you, and you totally sold me the wrong color.”
I was on the phone with the paint department of my semi-local Home Depot, and somebody was about to get the wrong end of my Righteous Indignation Stick. And that ‘somebody’ was gonna be Koko–after all, she was the one directly responsible for the painting pickle I was in.
Oh, that’s right–you’ve walked into the middle of yet another one of my Remodeling Shenanigans stories. If you’re just now joining us, and missed last week’s broadcast, you can catch up and read that post here.
The short version of the story is that I was trying to get Home Depot to color-match a specific color of paint–HGSW2507: PaperKraft to be seemingly overly precise–and despite my objections, Koko more or less forced me to go home with 3 cans of this paint color:
What’s so wrong with this picture is that the paint is supposed to match the color of the wall in the background. But from the samples on the lid, it is clear that we got Shanghai’d into buying a lovely shade of “baby diarrhea brown” instead of the much less ocularly offensive Paper Kraft. And, as a reminder, Koko had insisted that “the paint will get lighter as it dries”, which all now know was a load of baby bullsh*t.
And I was going to let ol’ Koko hear all about it. Hence, my phone call/airing of my grievances.
“Oh, it was the wrong shade? Ok, bring it back in then,” was her annoyingly calm reply.
“Well, I can’t exactly do that–it’s a 40 minute drive for me, and I’m about to be in the middle of putting my girls down for the night. But I need the right paint no later than first thing tomorrow morning. I don’t know exactly what I want you to do, but whatever it is I need done stat!”
I then proceeded to theorize at great length that perhaps she had accidentally used a darker white base paint, and that is how we ended up with the suspiciously fecal-esque paint.
“No, that was the right base. It’s what’s used for most colors except the lightest ones…like off-white,” was her response.
“Off-white! Exactly! That’s what I’m trying to tell you! Paper Kraft is and off-white color! I swear, we need to be using the Ultra Pure White base…though that sounds almost racist now that I saw it aloud…” I trailed off, distracted by my own thoughts.
“Look, Mon, just bring the paint back in as soon as you can and I’ll fix it by adding the right tint or whatever it takes. See you tomorrow?”
“Okay, well, I’m pretty sure you’re not going to be able to fix it by adding anything, but you’re dang straight I’m going to be bringing this paint back to you. Not tomorrow, but probably Tuesday after I get off work.”
“Great. Just bring it back in as soon as you get the chance, and we’ll get you taken care of…”
“Hmmm…I’m not really satisfied with the idea that she just used the wrong base,” I pondered aloud to myself paint, “and I’m pretty sure I’m not crazy–Paper Kraft is off-white, right? This requires some more investigation…let’s see what happens when I do a DuckDuckGo image search for PaperKraft paint…”
First that popped up before my inquiring eyes confirmed that I was right to be full of righteous anger, and I wasn’t just being a self-righteous bastard:
Surely, you, too, Dear Reader, can clearly see all the off-white samples there on the bottom row. Statistically speaking, “Paper Kraft” can only be interpreted as an off-white, not sh–wait just tick… *scrolls down a hair*
“Wait, what’s this??? I’d recognized that sewer-water shade from a mile away! What is the name of this horrid hue most foul?!?” I did do declare to my computer screen.
Let me zoom in for you playing along at home:
“You gotta be effin’ kidding me–‘Craft Paper‘???” I continued my monologue. “What a bunch of buttholes to go and have ‘Paper Kraft’ and ‘Craft Paper’! Who does that? Sherwin Williams, you Sher-win are a big jerk!”
Yeah, that’s not just setting us all up to fail or nothin’…well, at least now I had a better scientific theory as to how such a royal funk-up could happen with the paint codes…
“Say there, My Beautiful Bride, any chance you’ll be going be a Home Depot on your way to feed Roberta’s cats?”
It had only recently occurred to me that while I wouldn’t be in the geographic vicinity of the offending Home Depot any time in the next couple of days, the wife was going to be going right past one on her way to feed her former boss’s cats that evening. (I won’t go into the whole multi-thousand dollar cat-sitting gig that she had found herself suckered into–that’s a story for another time…just thought I would vaguely mention it though…)
“Yeah, I suppose so. You need me to pick up anything?” she replied through the static of her cellphone.
“You bet I do! I think I figured out the whole paint situation, and I think I get the right color made. I’ll call up their paint department first and make sure they got things straight. You should be able to pick it up on your way back.”
“Okie-dokie!” I’m pretty sure she said before hanging up.
At that point I got on the horn with paint department of this other, hopefully more helpful, Home Depot. A mature gentlemen picked up on the other end of the line.
“Paint department, how can I help you?”
At this point I’ll spare you the play-by-play detail of this phone call, but I’ll try to break down the key moments. First of all, my dude said he could pull up codes, but the system didn’t allow him to preview them. That was a pain in the neck, since I couldn’t ask him to describe to me what to expect from anything he might pull up.
Speaking of ‘pull up’, he eventually discovered that there were two ‘Paper Krafts’ in the system, though it remains unclear whether one of them was spelled with a ‘C’ instead of a ‘K’. And, to his amazement, when he looked at the ‘recipe'2The different amounts of the primary colors that are mixed into the base white paint. Much like an RGB code, for you ----- nerds out there. they produced two very different colors.
He totes be like:
“I knew it!” I said in that particular moment, feeling rather vindicated. Though I have to admit, I wasn’t too pleased about my knack for finding the proverbial ‘Glitch in the Matrix’ in the computer systems of home improvement stores (there a couple of untold stories involving me absolutely breaking the point-of-sale system over at Lowe’s–involuntarily, of course).
We then proceeded to mix the color recipe in our imaginations, trying to figure out which one was going to be the correct off-white Paper Kraft. Funny enough, I did actually have the Sherwin Williams (not HGSW) recipe in front of me, on the old can of paint I had found in our garage from the 2021 remodel. Not so funny enough, Home Depot has a completely different recipe system, so it was like the home improvement version of the Tower of Babel.
Eventually, we nailed down with 98.7% confidence which Paper Kraft was the right one I needed.
“Okay…so can I put in an order for this color while you have it in front of you, and then have my wife pick it up in an hour or so?” I requested, self-assured that I had finally slayed this beast.
“Oh, no, we can’t do that. We don’t take orders over the phone. No sir…we’ve mixed the wrong color too many times that way, so now the policy is that somebody must be standing here in person ordering it.”
“Jeez, you gotta be kidding me, after all we’ve been through together and what it’s taken to get us to this point? How can I have any assurance that the right recipe gets mixed up when she shows up?”
“I’ll leave a note,” he stated flatly.
“Um…okay. I guess. Well, can I get your name, in case she runs into any trouble?”
“Oh, sure, my name’s Robert,” paint department Robert informed me.
“Hah! I’m a Robert, too! That’s gotta be good sign…right?” narrator-of-this-story BJ quipped.
“Indubitably.”
“One last thing…how do I get my money back?”
Silly me, I about forgot to ask the Million Dollar Divided By 6666.667 Question.
“No problem–that was clearly an error due to our system. Bring it in and we’ll refund it for you.”
“Shucks, Robert, you are the best! I’ll do that as soon as I get the chance.”
..and from there, everything went as smooth as the bowel movement of a meat-eater who’s just popped an Ex-Lax suppository…
…
…
JK Kidding, of course it didn’t go smoothly from there. After that I had put in an online order for the base paints, and had instructed My Beautiful Bride to pick them up from the Pick Up desk, and then take them to the paint department to have her prepaid paint mixed up.
Well, she hung out from 7 to 8 pm for one of us to get the text notification that the online order was ready for pickup, before giving up and heading home literally seconds before I finally got it at 8:16 pm. She was already halfway home and told me “Fuck it–I got feed Roberta’s fat-ass cats in the morning. I’ll pick it up on my way back then.”
Anyways, I eventually did get the paint later in the day that I had over-optimistically estimated that I would need it, though–surprise, surprise–I didn’t actually end up painting anything until 3 or 4 days later.
Welp…with that out of the way, the only left to do to get full resolution is the easy-peasy task of returning the poo-poo paint and getting my $150 back…
Stay tuned…
Content created on: 28/29/30 July 2023 (Fri/Sat/Sun)
Footnotes & References:
Leave a Reply