Dodgeville

We paid our first visit to a Lowe’s today, stopping in at the store on Castlefield on our way home. It’s just your typical big box store with not much remarkable about it. On this particular afternoon, the employees outnumbered the shoppers, yet true to big box form, the employees managed to be anywhere but where they could answer questions.

When checking out with a credit card, they have you sign one of those digital pads like UPS or Purolator. Maybe I don’t get out enough, but it seemed a little odd to me. I don’t exactly wear a tinfoil hat, but as an IT guy who’s spent far too much time reading the PCI security standards lately, I’m not a big fan of digitizing my signature into the same system that just swiped my credit card.

Partly because no one actually checks signatures any more anyway, and partly because I still remember Zug’s inspiring credit card prank from I don’t know how many years ago, I decided to sign with a simple undulating wave. What I didn’t realize was that they would print it out on the receipt and hand it back to me. Risa can never keep a straight face when I step outside the socially-acceptable box, and neither could I when I discovered that I got to keep a record of my protest against digital silliness, no matter how trivial it may seem. It’s not like I was signing with stick men or hieroglyphics. Maybe next time.

Permalink

From the “Who knew it was such a rampant problem?” department comes the warning painted inside this dump truck, which probably makes more sense when the dumper is horizontal and the truck is in a quiet parking lot at the end of a long day of work.

I’m guessing that whoever got tired of cleaning the urine-soaked asphalt out of the corner of the truck didn’t realize that his painted message would be visible to the entire world when the truck body was tilted up. Chalk up another curiosity surrounding truckers and urine.

A version of this article originally appeared on Torontoist.

Permalink

I’ve always been fascinated by the little signs, slogans, or scrawlings that people use to protest some indignity, whether real or perceived. I found this one today stuck on a “no trespassing” sign at the Hearn generating station in the port lands. No, I don’t know what it means, or why the writer chose this particular location to make this particular political statement.

Permalink