The Seven Words You Can’t Say Outside of Home Depot

I’ve let my alter-ego stand-up-comic Frankie merrily riff on this topic in one of my novels, but today I needed to have some fun with it: I dare you to find one term in the lexicon of hardware that is not a double-entendre.

Think about it. Think about the word “hardware” itself. A guy had to come up with that one. And the original concept of the hardware store, where guys could get away from their women on a Saturday morning and safely sit around and compare the size and power of their tools. Among other tools and sundry tool-related items they sell are hammers, drills, nails, screws, nuts, hickeys, studs, nipples, plungers, pipes, plugs, j-boxes, c-clamps, adjustable knobs…

Well, OK. I doubt you can make much of “lock washer,” “drywall,” “reciprocating table saw,” or “¼-20 T-bar connector,” but I bet there are some enterprising readers out there who can. Extra points for using as many as you can in a sentence. A free copy of my next book (if it’s ever published) for crafting a halfway-decent limerick.

At my last job I worked in the lighting industry, and mostly with men. I was, among the many other hats I wore, the team leader for the drafting and development of installation instructions. The team consisted of me and a bunch of guys, most of whom came from the construction industry. And there we were on Friday mornings, the guts of some lighting fixture spread across a table, coffee and donuts all around, talking about nipples and hickeys and male and female connectors with totally straight faces. In any other context, this would probably be illegal (of course that depended upon what the guys were intending to do with the lighting fixture or the donuts). And if not for sexual harassment policies, we might have actually been laughing and having some fun with how ridiculous all these terms were.

I guess if women (most women) named these items, we’d have to step up to the guy in the orange apron (actually not, because an informal poll told me that most women would prefer to go to Lowe’s rather than Home Depot…as Home Depot makes things difficult as hell to find and probably appeals to the Magellan instinct in the male brain) and ask for the do-hinkey or the whatcha-ma-call it thingie that goes inside the back of the toilet.

And we’d get laughed right out of the place. Or maybe the guy would raise an eyebrow and offer to come over and check out our plumbing.

See, you just can’t win.

I wonder if there’s some kind of training class for Home Depot employees. Kind of like EST (it’s from the 70s, kids, Google it if you’re interested) where they lock you in a room and don’t let you eat or pee until you can talk about nuts and hickeys and nipples without blushing or giggling.

If I ask, I doubt they would tell me. They’ve probably signed some kind of gag order like the contestants on reality shows, garnishing their potential winnings or threatening legal action if they talk to anyone about how the guts of the operation works.

And I’m dying to know about how the reality shows work. Especially “Survivor.” That guy banished to Exile Island is hardly there alone. There’s the camera guy and the lighting guy and the director and at the end of the day do they beat it for the catering tent and the luxury hotel while some contestant who lost 20 pounds living on rice and grubs for the last 35 days has to machete open a coconut, pull up a palm frond for a blanket and lump it?

And I wonder how many trips to Home Depot are needed to make the sets, build the challenges, etc. for one entire season?

It’s just this curiosity thing. I can’t help it.