While my wife was tending to our two and a half year old son our four week old daughter decided to pitch the biggest fit of her short life. However I remained calm and confidently remembered the five S's to calming an upset baby. I Swaddled her, held her lovingly in my arms on her Side, then Swayed back and forth as I Sucked on a bottle of Scotch. 

Those are the five S's right?

With the arrival of our daughter six days ago, our two and a half year old son Fin has launched a full scale hunger strike in protest to this new arrival. He is subsisting entirely on Ritz crackers (if any Ritz executives are reading this and would like to discuss any endorsement/promotion opportunities, I am all ears.)

Since this is the 20th anniversary of "grunge" I would like to dedicate the following to my son Fin...

Have you ever noticed how events, good or bad, happen in bunches?  I work from home on Fridays, I find working from home challenging because of distractions, and we live in a small space so finding a quite place to work away from my wife and son is not easy.  Fortunately my wife understands and usually schedules a full day of fun and errands out of the house with our son.  Today was no exception.

We hired a plumber to install a new kitchen faucet since ours had a variety of problems. He arrived at 11:00 AM and assured me I didn't need to stop working and I "wouldn't even know" he was here.  He uninstalled the old faucet quickly and was almost done installing the new one when he noticed a piece missing from the box I had purchased.  Of course it's not that simple these three events happened within three minutes of each other while I was on the phone for work

1)  The plumber informs me of the faucet problem

2)  My wife called and left a message (I was on the other line) saying the car won't start, she and our two year old son are several miles from home

3)  My boss emails that he wants to talk in 10 minutes 

On the surface all of these are easily solvalbe, but in that moment I was frazzled.  By the time I called my wife back she arrived home - clearly the car is ok.  She agrees to take our son to Lowe's, about 10 minutes away, to exchange the faucet so I can continue working and call my boss back.  The plumber agrees to go grab lunch and come back in 45 minutes.  That sould be plenty of time...or so we thought.

Unfortunately Lowe's in Dedham Massachusetts had other plans.  My wife, who is six months pregnant, and has a two year old in tow, is able to locate the same faucet but can't find anyone to help to ensure that the same piece isn't missing from the box.  She asks several people for help but is repeatly told "you need to get someone from the plumbing department."  After being told several times "someone from plumbing is on their way" and waiting for too long she heads to check-out and not only did she not get any help from the cashier she is told "I don't know what you want me to do?"  She asks if they have anything to loan her to open the box herself to look and she is told "I don't have anything to open that box."  It's a hardware store!!  My patient wife repeatedly asked for help and waited for an hour!  Let me repeat, my six month pregnant wife and two year old son waited almost and hour at Lowe's in Dedham Massachusetts for someone to help her open a box - she was treated rudely in the process.

Bad costumer service in the age of social media is a really bad strategy - bad customer service to a pregnant women is a really, really bad strategy, bad customer service and rude behavior to a pregnant woman holding a two year old in the age of social media is as bad as it gets.  

We feel this expereince is worth sharing.

For good measure I googled "Lowe's sucks" and got 503,000 hits some of which I would like to promote here:

http://www.screwedcentral.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/000484.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc0_KF2fGJo&feature=related (video)

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070924/040616.shtml - Lowes tries to silence Lowes sucks website

Also try googling "Lowes Blows" and/or "Lowe's Blows"

Clearly this is more than a few isolated incidents and seems to be Lowe's culture and environment.  

Goodbye forever Lowe's - sometimes one encounter changes everything.  

Please repost and/or leave a comment if you have had a positive or negative expereince with Lowe's.

(note: this happened 8 days ago, I intentionally waited to post so our reaction wasn't knee-jerk. 8 days later we're still angry.)