When Skateboarding is in Fact, a Crime
My wife Heather and I were in the local big box hardware store, looking for plants. As usual when browsing, we drifted and separated.
I ended up next to a stack of these round, rolling platform caddy things. You can put a planter on them and your plant becomes mobile. Just the thing if you need to shift your plant on a deck or are towing your crops behind a vehicle.
Plastic caddies with wheels. Or… were they actually skateboards?
They say that creativity is looking at the same thing as everyone else and seeing something different. They say that intelligence is being seeing more than one use for a simple tool.
I’m inserting these “they say” notes to bias your view on what happened next.
I placed one of the caddies on the floor and tested my booted foot on it. If it held, I imagined using one for each foot and skating around the warehouse.
Radically bodacious!
I put the slightest bit of my weight on the caddie and it shattered, exploded even. Plastic shards went flying. Loudly.
Now I’m not the trimmest fellow, but I don’t think my weight was the problem. Those darn things just weren’t made to hold anything over twenty American pounds. And your honor, if I may continue my defense, nowhere on the caddy label was there a warning, “Do not use this as a skateboard.”
Anyhoo, I’m now standing over a fractured plastic caddy. There was no one around. I did what any honest person would do and put the broken pieces back on the shelf, walked away, intending to exit the store, never speaking of the incident again.
But my conscience took over. Or I considered that those giant warehouse places have cameras everywhere.
If I just walked out after breaking an item, the store might have it on video. I could end up on the news, go viral as “The Caddy Killer” and who knows what else. It was just the kind of silly minor infraction that would lure a righteous internet mob into my life.
Blame my irresistible nobility or the fear of getting caught. I returned to the scene of the incident and collected the pieces. I would pay for the darn thing. “You broke it you bought it” is an unwritten rule of capitalism, as is “screw your workers.”
On the way to the check out, I passed an employee and asked his opinion.
“Hey, so um, I broke this thing because I tried to use it as a skateboard. Should I pay for it?”
I was hoping the employee would release me from the guilt. I imagined him taking it from me and saying, “This happens all the time. I’ll chuck it out back with the others.”
The employee shrugged, “Well, I guess so,” he said. It was very non-committal. How dare he avoid responsibility?
I went and bought the busted thing and even rounded up for the charity, because that’s the kind of person I am. I went to the car, put the pieces in, and went off to find Heather.
In the garden area, while passing behind a row of tall plants, I heard three employees chatting. One laughed as he shared a tale, “… and then he said, ‘I tried to use it as a skateboard!’ should I pay for it?”
I sprang from my hiding place. “Are you talking about me?”
They all turned, the gossiping employee shocked, surely afraid that I was going to flip out. And at just that moment, Heather showed up. The five of us (three employees, me, and Heather) all discussed the tale of the failed skateboard.
And everyone had a good laugh.
The lesson here is, don’t use plastic plant caddies as skateboards. Or maybe it’s that sometimes skateboarding is a crime when you do it right. Or wrong.
Well, hopefully there’s something less specific to my tale and more global to learn. I can’t leave you with nothing. There must be a lesson here somewhere. This can’t be all just sound and fury signifying nothing… can it?
Let’s go with this: Make your own mistakes, clean up the mess you make, and make sure you have fun. And if you round up your bill for some charity, definitely tell everyone.