Positive and Negative Screwdrivers

I don't like to admit it, but even I have an occasional "Here's Your Sign" moment.

For those who don't know, "Here's Your Sign" is a catchphrase immortalized by comedian Bill Engvall of Blue Collar Comedy Tour fame.  The bit includes examples of dumb things we catch ourselves saying every day.

Mine happened this week at a Walmart.

I was looking for a couple of screwdrivers to replace a pair that had gone missing from my computer repair kit.  They weren't stolen or hijacked.  The truth is that I had used them a couple of weeks ago in my home office, and I haven't been able to find them since.  That should give you some indication of just how messy my office is.  How bad is it?  I'd rather go out and buy new stuff than hazard an in-depth exploration mission within the confines of those four walls.  Much like shipwrecks in the Atlantic Ocean, I know the stuff is in there, but it's just too hard to find it.  Now if I had James Cameron money, where I could hire experts with depth finders and expensive deep sea diving equipment...

So this week I found myself in the tool aisle checking out inexpensive screwdrivers.  In my opinion, they are one of the most basic of tools.  I'm pretty sure that when the early upright-standing creatures in our history invented items to assist in their cave improvement projects, the first Sears Craftstroglodyte implement was a hammer.  Right after that, it had to be the screwdriver, so he'd have something to hammer on.  The second tool became so popular, six million years later an Englishman invented screws just so Ye Olde Hardware stores could charge more for the device.

For being a basic tool, modern man certainly has an impressive variety of options, not to mention brand names.

I decided that I needed screwdrivers with magnetic tips.  As I get older, my handyman skills have embarked upon a race between my failing eyesight and my less-than-steady hands.  The combination has resulted in every repair job taking twice as long as it used to because of the time now spent hunting for dropped screws.  (I fill that extra time with an ever-expanding vocabulary of creative curse words and epithets.)

I ended up checking out a rack of Stanley screwdrivers with magnetized tips. 

I noticed something interesting while examining the cards to which the tools were attached.  Some of the cards had a + symbol, while others had the - symbol.

"How interesting," I said, because I'm old and I'm in Walmart, where talking to yourself is required by law.  "Not only are the tips magnetized, Stanley is so sophisticated that they even tell you whether the magnetic charge is positive or negative."

I put the screwdrivers back and continued down the aisle because, in addition to being old, shaky, and increasingly blind, I've also become notoriously cheap, and felt $2.88 was just too much for a magnetic screwdriver.

All the way down the aisle, I continued to ponder the benefits of knowing whether a magnetized tip was positive or negative.  Maybe it was better to keep positively charged tips next to negatively charged tips to maintain the polarity longer.  Or it could have been a housekeeping issue -- if you neatly place a bunch of screwdrivers with the same polarity next to each other, they might repel each other and make a mess of your drawer.  Or perhaps there are people who are older, crankier, and even more anal retentive than I am, who insist on purchasing screwdrivers with identical charges, like those women who insist that all the patterns on their silverware have to match.

I was actually two aisles away before the "Here's Your Sign" light clicked on.

The symbols had nothing to do with the magnetic polarity.

They were actually identifying which kinds of screwdrivers were being sold.

The + meant Phillips head, the - meant slotted or flat head.

I ended up skulking out of the store without any screwdrivers, hoping the old guy in the next aisle telling the hacksaws about his sullen wife and ungrateful grown children hadn't heard me.