Honor the Horrors of the Internet

Why I shop at lowes.

We thought it was a fluke with the radio. What else could it be?

Here we are, two siblings making the three hour drive to see our mom for Mother's Day, and suddenly our normal station is hissing and spitting at us like an angry cat. There's a garbled jingle, probably ripped straight from some Sears commercial in the '90s, and a monotonous voice speaking over it as clearly as the static will allow, announcing only one nonsensical phrase.

"There's a hole at the Home Depot."

Then we're right back to the hits we know and love from the '80s, '90s, and today.

To me and my brother, Trent, it was easy enough to pass off. We probably caught a snippet of a commercial while driving in some area where the signal was sketchy, or our shitastic jalopy had somehow managed to channel the radio of some hapless repairman en route to a particularly unlucky hardware store. If anything, it became a joke to us. To Trent--whose time on unemployment consisted of naps and podcasts--it was something straight out of Nightvale. Personally, I just found it hilarious in how unexpected it was.

We brushed it off. We went to mom's. We took her to dinner. We turned around and went home. Nothing anomalous happened, there were no ghosts or aliens or murderers or chupacabras. We didn't feel compelled to go buy a new marble finish for our counters. If anything was odd, it was that we noticed we never hit that patch of interference on our way back. Trent dropped me off at my apartment, sent me a text when he got to his, and weeks went by without us crossing paths. He looked for a job, I went to mine, and life was just as boring as it had always been.

Then, on my way to work, it happened. The hissing. The jingle. That phrase.

"There's a hole at the Home Depot."

I don't think I ever slammed on the brakes so fast in my life. Cars rushed around me like a river around a boulder, and I sat in a sea of honking drivers and saluting middle fingers. All I could think of as I sat there awkwardly on the interstate, though, was that I was miles away from the mid-point marker where we first heard this little ditty and this didn't seem like some sort of weird viral marketing campaign. Something tells me that horror nerds and ARG fans aren't Home Depot's target audience.

But, you know, coincidences happen. There isn't anything inherently terrifying about a hardware store and it's stupid to focus on what could be the stars aligning just right to bring you the same radio hiccup. It took a little bit of convincing, but I put my car into drive and finished my commute like nothing ever happened, aside from earning the ire of the majority of the city's drivers. I finished out my day in relative peace, thought briefly about sending my brother a text about my misadventure, then thought better of it and went home to curl up with Netflix and my cat.

Nothing's ever that simple, though. Nothing here is ever "just a coincidence." Otherwise, we wouldn't have a story worth telling; it'd just be a stupid little snippet on my Facebook wall to be forgotten a week later. That's why it wouldn't surprise you when I tell you it happened again, and again, and again, in different parts of the city, outside the city, on my boss' radio when I'm the only one in the office.

Hiss. Bad elevator music. The hole at the Home Depot.

What will surprise you, probably, would be the calls I'd receive. At work, at home; one minute I'm putting in an order for maintenance on the second floor, and my office phone rings. Or, I'm sitting at home trying to play Skyrim with my scant time off, and my cell rings. Or I log onto Skype and want to talk to a friend who's working overseas, and I get a call that forces itself on me, all static and easy listening.

"There's a hole at the Home Depot."

I think the final straw, though, was when my phone buzzed with a text from Trent. I don't know why I hadn't called him about all of the oddities that had been happening, aside from the fact I felt like it'd be a dick move to go to him for help when he's been having a hard enough time being out of work. Or maybe I was afraid he'd think I was crazy. I also don't know what I expected when I unlocked my phone to take a look at what he texted me, aside from the obvious.