The Key Is To Act Casual. (The Great Ranking Of Problems)

I had a moral dilemma on Sunday, one I've sort of faced before. Here's what happened: I'd gone to Home Depot to pick up the weekly plant and also some patio brick to continue the Path To Nowhere (which will now be a sort of stepping-stone Path To Nowhere, but that's beside the point).

I had in the cart 10 large patio bricks, stacked atop each other, and I was looking for the weekly plant and turned the cart around the corner. As I did that, the cart's wheel stuck in a grating that was there to drain water, and the cart stopped suddenly, but I didn't, and the top two bricks on the stack didn't, either -- sliding off and cracking on the floor.

No Home Depot employees were around, so I casually picked up the bricks, restacked them (trying to act as though I'd planned this and also as though I was perfectly okay with purchasing now-cracked patio bricks.) Then I casually made my way through the aisles until I casually got back to where the bricks were stacked, at which time I casually took the two broken bricks, put them back on the shelf, grabbed two unbroken bricks, and then made my way to the front of the store, where I then found the weekly plant, paid, and left.

So the moral dilemma is now the newest addition to The Great Ranking Of Problems, that being:

212: What to do about stuff I was going to buy but then it broke in the store and now I still want to buy the stuff but I don't want to buy something that was broken?

And this is, actually, a problem of importance (hence it's relatively high rank) because it just keeps happening.

A while back, when I took the Babies! shopping for some Christmas presents, Mr Bunches or Mr F, as we walked through the housewares department, grabbed a fancy serving tray off the shelf and threw it to the floor, breaking it. I hadn't even planned on buying a tray like that -- and I certainly didn't want to buy a now-broken one, so I said "What was that?" while looking around (clever, right?) and then left the store.

And long before that, Sweetie and I had gone to the store to pick out some fancy glasses (for when we used to do fancy drinking) and had selected a foursome, only to get to the cash register and find out that one had already been broken, so we slunk back to the aisle and left that one on the shelf and took a different package.

So I need a solution to this - but in the meantime, it's now ranked on The Great Ranking Of Problems.

Prior entries on The Great Ranking Of Problems:

99: Spousal PB&J Incompatibility.
173: Preshoveling & reshoveling snow.
...
413: Guilt Over Meanness To Sentient Paperclips
. . .
502: Having to wait forever, seemingly, for Italian food to cool down.
. . .
721: Printer not holding a lot of paper at once.
...
2,624: Unidentifiable Mystery Song Stuck In Head.
...
5,000: Lopsided Nail Clipping.
...
7,399: Potato(E?)s?
. . .
15,451: Almost napping.
14,452: Worrying that there's too much peanut brittle leftover to eat before it goes bad.
...
22,372: Having hair which isn't quite a definable color.
22,373: Having too many songs on an iPod