I’m really not much of one for thinking up subjects.

The box in which one types this says “Entry (This will go down on your permanent record)” Ooooh.. My permanent record. When I was much younger, I was lead to believe there was this “permanent record” on which all ones transgressions were reported. It never bothered me that there didn’t seem to be any such authority to keep track of such a record. The concept was frightening enough.

This was, of course, before I got old enough to care about things like civil liberties, and that such a permanent record would surely be in violation of them.

Much like Lowe’s tried to violate them today. I needed some CAT-V cable, and I wandered around Lowe’s not remembering quite where such things were stored. A very old man came up to me and asked if he could help me find something. I told him what I was looking for, and it turns out I had walked right past it. I was in the electrical section, and I was admiring the cable which was large enough it looked like it could carry all of the current to power a neighborhood. Or three. It probably was, but then I got carried away realizing how small it actually was in comparison to large transmission lines.

They sold CAT-V by the foot, and it appeared they had two different sorts. They were listed as “plenum” and “non-plenum”. One, of course, was substantially more expensive than the other. 19 cents a foot instead of 9 cents a foot or some such. The only thing that plenum conjured up in my brain is an evaluation of different sorts of intake manifolds.. The sort of intake manifold one finds in the good old cars from the good old days. A very large one which sits on top of 8 cylinders and supports a carburetor in a fasion not unlike a pedastel. Anyway, a plenum type manifold has a thin peice of metal which separates the manifold into different sections not far from where the carburetor joins. I’ve never really understood the point in a plenum even though I read a bit on the subject back when I drove a good old car. Some people seemed to think they were good things. Other people suggested filing them down. Others suggested removing them entirely. The intake on my car had one, and I figured that if Eidelbroch though it was a good idea, that he knew more about it than I, and I’d leave it alone.

Anyway, I imagined a thin sheet of metal dividing the twisted pairs in my cat-v briefly, then examined the two cables. One seemed to be a slightly different shade of blue than the other.

So I asked the rather old guy what the difference was, though not expecting much of an answer. He answered “Well, this one’s yur plenum. If yur gunna put it in yur livin room, you don’t need a conduit with the plenum. IF there’s a fire, and you got yur non-plenum, you’ll die from the vapors if you don’t have a conduit…” he went on for awhile, and nothing he said made any sense. In my mind, there’s cat-v. If it’s rated as such, it’ll do the job. There exterior and interior grade, and I can understand that okay. I picked the cheaper one, wondering what Eidelbroch would have picked.

He took the box of cable up to a little table with contraptions on it. He fed the cable through a tube and started winding a crank. A neat looking cable odometer starting counting. He wound until it read the request 100 feet I’d asked for. He cut the cable and wrapped it in electrical tape, then scribbled on a label and stuck it on the cable.

When I got to the check-out counter, the guy there seemed utterly unsure of what to do with either the cable or the sheets of metal I’d selected (in hopes to fix the armrest on the Exploder). After getting a manager who tried to explain it to him, he took me credit card and asked for my ID.

Which isn’t all that bad, but I found it rather frustrating as it was yet another step for them to go through, and was taking much longer for me to get my things.

And then Lowes, in typical capitalistic fashion, violated my rights. My god-given (well.. maybe not god-given) right to be free of unreasonable searches. I mean, there’s not a lot that I feel like I’ve got to be proud of in this country. And the bill of rights was a really bad idea, but I figured that I should at LEAST be granted the rights that someone decided specify a couple hundred years ago, even if that specification ran the risk of depriving me of other rights… The very polite woman a the door insisted upon searching me. And then comparing the results of her search with my receipt.

I never used to understand why this drove my father nuts, but I can understand now, the fuss he always made about it. If we don’t stand up for our rights at the beginnings of infringement, what will happen when it gets really important?

Our country is full of contradictions, and of late, I’ve been rather disgusted by them. This is a country where we seem to take so much pride in our “rights”, but here the very “right” to capitalism which we as Americans think is so important, leads directly to infringement of a much more important right, I think, our right to be free of unreasonable searches. It wasn’t my government searching me, it was LOWES… I got infuriated thinking about it as I was driving the exploder home. I essentially PAID them to search me.

Anyway, I’ll be shopping at Home Depot next time…