It was driven home to me recently that the real heroes of the diamond painting world aren’t the artists themselves, but rather the technicians who do the canvas renderings. Recently, I confidently dove into to working on a custom piece—an adorable cartoon turtle that my friend drew—and I quickly discovered how incredibly difficult it is to create visual coherence on a canvas with drills, even with careful pre-planning. I made several huge mistakes with the color choices and had pull hundreds of drills out with tweezers, causing a bout of wrist irritation, and my genius plan to avoid “blockiness” only made a mess of the poor turtle’s lovely shell, and I can’t get the bubbles to look right, and the seaweed is a bit off, and all in all, it’s been...lessons learned, is the best way I can put it. I thought it would be a simple, fun project that would work up rather quickly, but that has not been the case, my friends. That turtle is beginning to haunt me. Every time I walk past my craft table and look at its cute little turtle face, I am filled with vexation at my failure. However, I have determined that I will finish it by no later than next week, and let the results stand. I’ll know next time going into a custom piece that it’s going to involve a lot of trial and error and at least some bit of frustration. And, yes, there are computer programs that you can use for rendering, but that doesn’t solve my problem of not understanding what colors work with other colors and how to effectively use the confetti technique. It will be such a relief to get back to just mindlessly sticking drills down on a canvas in which all of the decisions have been made for me.
Speaking of frustration, my neighborhood grocery store is both a blessing and an ongoing source of low-grade annoyance. One annoyance is the carts. About a year ago, with no warning, they put locks on all of the carts, which required inserting a quarter, and for weeks customers were panhandling from each other or haplessly digging through their purses or bags trying to find a stray quarter so they could use a cart. Then, just as abruptly, they removed the locks—okay, great, except that along with that, they stopped supplying the smaller carts. You know, the little carts that are bigger than the hand-carried baskets but smaller than the unwieldy, full-sized carts. They also reduced staffing to zero to one checker at any given time, therefore forcing everyone through the self-checkout line, which the full-sized carts are nightmare to navigate through. During my grocery run this week, I was determined to get my hands on a small cart, and I got in the elevator to go down to the parking garage where I had seen one the previous week. I pressed the button for the parking floor, and the door listlessly slid in about two inches, then slid back. I pressed the button again—same result. After several attempts, it was obvious the elevator was broken, so I gave up and took the stairs.
I was rewarded for my determination by a single, solitary small cart in the far corner of the lot. However, the elevator being broken meant that I had to take the cart all the way up the driveway ramp, outside, and around to one of the entrances. The entrance that I could have gone in that had a direct route into the store with no stairs has been closed since COVID, which left me to have to go into another entrance with a short set of stairs. Not to be deterred, I started to half-carry, half-roll the cart down the steps, at which time a courtesy clerk came running up yelling, “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! What are doing??? You can’t do that! You can’t take a cart down the stairs!” Well, apparently, I could, because I did. I explained that I didn’t have any choice because the elevator was broken, a declaration at which he took great umbrage. “The elevator is not broken,” he huffed. “You just have to know the trick. There’s a trick.”
Now I was really getting irritated. “And just how am I supposed to magically know the secret trick to your broken elevator?”
He marched over to the elevator and got in. “You have to click the button repeatedly, really fast, like this,” he said, battering the button with his finger, as if this was totally obvious general knowledge and I was an idiot who didn’t know how to operate an elevator.
“If there is a special trick to getting your elevator to function, you need to put a sign up to let people know,” I snapped. “And also, maybe you should invest in elevator repair, because that seems like a safety issue to me.”
“If you need a certain kind of cart, you need to ask the staff for help,” he said, ignoring my statements. “We have big carts right there.”
At this point, I wasn’t going to escalate by pointing out that there is hardly ever even one single checker available, much less “staff” at the ready to help with anything, and that this whole situation could have been avoided if they either had small carts available, more checkers, or if they would open their main doors. It wasn’t worth it. I whisked off with my small cart to go get some fish from the fish lady, who was actually nice to me. Geez. A person takes her life into her owns hands these days just to get a darn small cart.
That’s been my week, turtle hauntings and broken elevators. I’ll post some photos next week of my experiment in dotting.
--Kristen McHenry
Sadly those types of encounters are not just limited to that particular grocery chain. I especially object to having to use self-check out when they are charging more for "staffing", but cutting back on staff.
May the rest of this week be a productive and stress-free one for you, Kristen! 😯