The definition of "fasteners" is riveting

Brad parked the van before turning to smile at me. "We just need to pop  in super-quick." I sighed. It's not a lie if you believe what you're saying is the truth. So I begrudgingly followed my husband into the store. The warehouse. The vacuumous echo-chamber of exploding budgets. The lumbering labyrinth of lost souls. Brad has an internal compass that seamlessly guides his way with the smooth, swift precision of Ariadne's thread while I stumble behind, blindly grasping at the hem of his shirt. 

"We just need a few straight boards," he said, sorting through the pile of straight boards. "I don't understand," I said, as he handed me the straightest of the straight boards to place on the wobbly cart. We had two carts going as he helpfully sorted warped boards out of the display pile. "What don't you understand?" he asked, squinting down the length of his next selection like he's sighting in a rifle. "In a grocery store, you buy groceries," I began. "Uh-huh," he mumbled, moving up the mountain of straight board to reach a particularly straight-straight board at the top. "In a clothing store, clothing." Brad descended, cradling his choice like Moses with the Ten Commandments. "Rightie-o," he agreed, making a swap on our wobbly cart. "Stuff-mart is considered a hypermarket, often combining what we know to be a department store and a drug store with a grocery store." Brad paused, impressed, before addressing my concern. "So you want to understand how this store is classified as it doesn't seem to follow a prescribed definition as it is not strictly a hardware store, landscaping/garden center, or a lumber yard."

I nodded as I watched several birds fly by. This does NOT happen in a grocery store. Maybe this was an aviary? 

I flipped the one hundred varieties of light switches (including panels, dials, and one sort of weird roller ball thing) while Brad solved a complicated mathematical equation to determine if he had enough straight boards. I wondered vaguely what project we needed these boards for before I got distracted by a display of toggle switches. 

"We just need some fasteners and then we're good to go," Brad announced, interrupting the fun little beat I'd created over there in toggle-town. We jogged half a football field down, balancing our boards on the wobbly-wheeled cart. We entered the fastener aisle. 

Life-altering.

When Brad said fastener, I had pictured those little bendy metal clips on the back of manila envelopes. I vaguely wondered why we would need these for our project.

Did you know that nails are considered fasteners? Along with screws, nuts, bolts, and even ratchet straps. "We have all this stuff at home," I commented, both bewildered and enlightened. "Wait! Are magnets considered fasteners?" Brad sighed as he searched. "It's an umbrella term...anything that joins two or more items together is considered a fastener." He pulled a handful of smooth, half-dollar sized silver donut discs out of a nifty little drawer among a wall of thousands of nifty little drawers. A fancy fastener apothecary. "Zipper?" "Yes." "The end of an earring?" "Yes." I gasped. "The Flexn' Seal on the sandwich bags?" He stood. "We're done."

As we wheeled our wobbly cart to the register, I pondered these broad definitive terms. This store is too large to be defined...the best its interweb descriptor could do was to label it a home improvement retailer. But we just passed a display of cargo pants. Do the button fasteners validate their shelf presence? Who walks into a home improvement retail establishment with the INTENT of purchasing pants? I know when I walk into a grocery store, I am going to find milk and bread and eggs. My only chance encounter with a bird will be in the meat department. I will not have to deal with the stress of being faced with an endless aisle labeled "Things made with flour." 

I'd made it to the register but had lost Brad. Not a big deal in a grocery store. I can usually find him looking for chocolate almond ice cream. Who knows where he could be in this home improvement retail wasteland? 

Of course I found him by the dry wall (Does wet wall exist, by the way?). Sadly, we didn't have enough room in the van to make such an ambitious purchase. "One project at a time," he said encouragingly. Wait. There's ANOTHER project? What's the first one?