Late for my my pickup, accidentally stealing

Who knows.

I'm just off the plane and JJ is supposed to pick me up. I wander around waiting for him, and it's down on Harvard (so-called "Bricklight Dist"), rather than around the airport. He will be a bit yet, so I take a look around. There are lots of new stores along there, stores I've never seen before. I wander into a framing business, set into one of those narrow, deep storefronts. It is structured so there are alcoves along the walls, with counter islands down the center. Each alcove is lined with bins, overflowing with parts and bits. The bins are al wood, painted a lightly greenish off-white.

There are signs everywhere, saying that the parts they are selling are only available to customers who have ordered framing with those parts, because why would they sell stuff to someone not getting their framing done there? Personally, I find this to be a stupid business philosophy, but hey, whatever. I'm fiddling around, and I have my hands in a bin of valve stems when I realize that I've lost track of time, and Josh is probably out there driving around cursing me. I scurry out to the street to make myself visible, but he's nowhere in sight. I'm nearly certain that I've missed him, and a sheepish dread overtakes me. I also realize that I have one of those valve stems in my hand, I accidentally ran out with it. Damn!

I get a hold of Stephanie and she picks me up, and we start looking for Josh. We drive all over, back toward the airport, along Harvard, up this way and down that. Eventually, we do find him. He's annoyed, but hey, sorry. I tell them that I need to take this valve stem back to the store. We go to the store, and the stem has turned into a large steel machine part, with a double-bar bolted to swinging solid steel weights or giant pins. I go to the counter, explain to the two women and one man there what I did, how dumb I feel about it. They are a strangely "wholesome" seeming group of people, very Anne Taylor meets Sears dress-up. No one really speaks to me, but one woman smiles knowingly and takes the steel implement from me, begins hitching green rope through loops and holes, as if preparing it to do whatever it might be supposed to do. She hands it back to me and rings up $10.00.

I have no intention of buying it, I tell her. I brought it back because it was the right thing to do, and I'm sorry. But I'm not buying it. This is going nowhere. Holier than thou and full of shit, they stand there smugly. I start to shout, I explain to them that their store is ridiculous, their philosophy stupid. I scream that I've been in framing for a decade, and I know everybody, including the people at the museum across the way, and I will make sure that absolutely no one takes advantage of their services. I slam the steel thing down onto the counter, and actually it cracks through and impresses itself into the plys of the wood. Josh and Stephanie have made their way back now, hearing my altercation, and we hustle out of there fast.