SAMPLE THIS COLOR

I have a great plan to steal paint samples, and if I'd only gone to Home Depot, I would've been able to pull it off.  But I go to the teeny Ace Hardware store up the street instead because I work really late and need to get home at some point.

Let me explain what I need.  I need those paint sample sheets with swatches of five colors on them, colors with names like Soda Fountain Delight and Hemlock Hangover.  I don't give a rat's ass what the colors actually are.  I just need them to have bizarre names.  And I need at least eighty of those paint sample sheets.  I know they have them at Home Depot because that's where I stole them from the first time I needed them last summer.

Okay, I'm not truly stealing them since they're free.  But I assume they're meant to be free to people who will actually use them to buy paint to really paint something, like a wall or a fence or a garage door.  I intend to use them for a writing project with my students.  The colors and their names serve as writing prompts to an exercise one of my professors had us do during a writing seminar class.

The little hardware store has the sample sheets with three colors per, and those are the ones I intend to take: 80+ sheets of triple-color samples.  When I reach for the first one ... a sales clerk comes over.  She starts asking me all of these questions and I'm dumbfounded.  I don't expect a Spanish Inquisition (nobody ever does).  I just want to steal the damn paint sample sheets.

So I make shit up.  I start talking about some friend who wants to repaint.  Which room?  oh, several.  Several rooms.  What color pallette?  Um, that's why I need the samples.  I need lots and lots of samples.

She promptly steers me away from the sample display and hands me pamphlet after pamphlet with stupid round splotches and lots of pictures.  I don't want the pictures!  I want the sample sheets!  I want the --- I want -- I -- LADY, LET GO OF ME!

She literally yanks me from the color swatches, over and over.  Every time I try to go back to grab the samples, she growls at me and forces me back around the corner to the useless end display.  She is not going to give me any of those sample sheets, let alone the 80+ that I need.

My lesson plan for Thursday is screwed.  Big time.

I end up grabbing four identical pamphlets that boast "120 colors that all go together!", which I know is absolutely impossible from my years as an assistant manager of a fabric store where color-coordinating calicoes proved that there are some colors, many less than 120, that definitely do not go together.  These color swatches have names like "Lamp Shade" and "Change of Heart," which will work.  But many of the colors won't work with 'tweens, colors with names like "California Cabernet." 

This conundrum, though, inspires me to come up with an alternate to the original assignment, still using the pamphlets.  I'm going to cut the usable colors with appropriate names into Scrabble-like tiles, and we'll need more glue, and then ...

HA!  The salesclerk thinks she has thwarted me, but all she succeeds in doing is making me crazier than I already am.  Actually, she probably figures that out when I take four identical pamphlets.  She probably figures that I am insane for the duplicate booklets in addition to trying to steal the random samples in the first place. 

I should just tell her the truth.  She might help me pick out the most creatively named 80 samples as she knows them, anyway.

Oh well.  Live, learn, and hoard paint sample sheets.  I'll let you know how it all works out.