The new manager worked hard to keep morale up at our floundering store. "A can of kerosene and a match! That's the best thing that could ever happen to this place!," he would frequently say. He would talk frankly about the hard time he was being given by headquarters, and I tried to console him by telling him it wasn't his fault, and the next time those bastards called just put me on the phone with them! My attempts to be nice and understanding weren't winning any points, though. My pal, the assistant manager, told me, "I know he's out here acting like he's your buddy, but when I go in his office he's telling me, 'I want him out of here.'" HUH?

There was the document-every-second-of-the-day regimen. Once I recall being sent to Buford Highway to pick something up, which was a 30 or 40-mile round trip, and at rush hour, no less. When I got back I remember him squinting his eyes and saying, "You sure were gone a long time." No shit, Sherlock!

Another time he Nextel'd me frantically to come back to the store. I came in, and he said, "Where have you been, man? Customer X is looking for you!" Customer X was exactly where I was headed when he made me detour back to the store! It was right there on the agenda we had made that morning! DURRR!

"Art! Art!" An assistant manager was calling me out of the stock room. "Did you take a check without getting a driver's license?" She was holding a corporate check I had taken that morning. Yes, I did, because you don't get a driver's license for a corporate check, just consumers. "David (the manager) has said we need to get a driver's license for all checks. He just announced this today." Okay, so you're haranguing me about a rule that came out five minutes ago? All-right.

Now let me understand...so if I take a delivery to the Home Depot headquarters, as I often did, and the CEO is out of town on business, he has to fly back in and come down to the lobby to show me his driver's license? Apparently this is what they were saying. Hey, I'm not here to argue.

Friday we had a business order for several thousand dollars that was supposed to be delivered at 10 that morning that was only coming off the copiers at 4 that afternoon. I tossed it on the back of the van and bolted over there. At the loading dock window I told the clerk I would need a driver's license, because we were getting them even for business orders now. She called the guy who owned the company and he came to the dock, already steamed his stuff was seven hours late. Then I informed him I needed his driver's license.

"What?! What's the number to your store?" He called. Then he said, "I thought so," hung up. "They just told me you don't need a driver's license." They did? Thanks for backing me up, shitheads! I took his check with no driver's license info and waited for the pink to ebb from my face.

I got back to the store and Barbara, the shift supervisor he had talked to, said, "Okay, give that check to Ron so he can put it in the register." I took it to the Ron the counter person and he refused to take it. "Ron, put that check in that register!," the shift supervisor directed.

"I can't! It doesn't have a driver's license number on it!"

Barbara became furious, "Ron, I'm telling you as a shift supervisor to put that check in the drawer!"

"And I'm telling you as a counter person I can't!"

I put the check on the counter, un-knotted my tie and moved on to my Friday evening. Monday I came back to get the update on the controversy. It turned out I had been right all along, you only get driver's license info on consumer checks, not corporate ones, as common sense would dictate if anyone had any. I was a Titan among mental midgets.

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