For the love of Barbeque

Harry brought us some mesquite chips so that we could have a taste of home here in the middle of France. Only problem was, we didin't have a barbeque pit. So we set out to find the perfect pit. Since we had to take the car, we decided to first look at the megastores on the outskirts of town. We were looking for a small, portable, cheap pit like you would find in Walgreens or Walmart for less than 10 bucks. Ha... what a dream. What we found instead was interesting. I guess since we were shopping in the suburbs, the pits for sale were the really big things (like we have at home) where you can hook up a gas tank. Obviously not what we had in mind. We went over to the camping section of the stores and found exactly the kind of thing we were looking for, only YOU HAD TO PLUG IT IN. It was some kind of electric thing. We thought maybe we should buy a tent to see if it came with an electrical socket. Some things we just can't find an explanation for! So anyway, we didn't find what we wanted so we travelled back into the city and decided to look at the mall in town.

In the camping section there were 2 choices. One was a square portable pit and the other was round. The round one was the only one of its kind left and was on a high shelf, the box was falling apart, and it had been marked down from (ouch) 60 euros to 30 euros. We managed to get it into the shopping basket and took it over to the checkout lady to pay for it. She didn't quite know how to handle the markdown so she made a phone call to someone. She then told us she would charge us full price and then we could go over to customer service and get a refund. So that's what we did.

We went to Customer Service and the guy there didn't quite know how to handle the situation so he had a conference with someone else in the booth. Then he got on the phone and called someone. After that, he was attempting to find a barcode in a book when someone that looked like his boss walked up. They discussed the situation and the boss got on the phone to call someone. At this point I looked over at Paul and I noticed that he was counting with his fingers the number of conferences that were taking place over this purchase/refund. It was 5. As they were continuing to work the problem, the boss decided to call another person. Now we are up to 6 conferences. I figured we would be there a long time, so I decided to try and get the pieces of the pit back into the box that was falling apart and out came the bowl part of the pit, in pieces! At that point, Paul told the guy... "cancel everyting". The store guy looked so relieved - he smiled at us and if to say.... "A cancellation I can handle.... a partial refund... no can do."

We got our money back and then went back inside and bought the square pit.