In America, you do not ask a Home Depot employee for plumbing advice. Home Depot employees are mythological creatures. They exist only in your peripheral vision. If you make direct eye contact with an orange apron, they dissolve into lumber or mount a forklift and escape into another dimension. You look for a man in aisle eight whose Carhartt pants have drywalled at least two recessions. My kitchen sink was leaking a slow, rhythmic tragedy. I brought a corroded copper pipe and a mysterious brass collar to the store, hoping for mercy. I stood in aisle eight for twelve minutes, staring at eight thousand brass fittings, completely paralyzed. A man stopped his cart beside me. He wore muddy boots and a faded baseball cap for a gravel company that went bankrupt in 2004. In his cart was a single pack of drywall anchors. He looked at the corroded pipe in my hand. He did not say hello. He said, "What year was the house built?" "Nineteen seventy-four," I answered. He let out a heavy, gravelly sigh. It was the sigh of a judge delivering a life sentence to his own brother. "Polybutylene," he muttered with pure disgust. "God damn it." I did not know what polybutylene was. I did not ask. The man abandoned his cart in the middle of the aisle. He grabbed my forearm and pulled me three bays to the left. "Don't touch that brass," he commanded. "You don't solder. Look at your hands. You sit at a computer." He reached into the metal bins with terrifying speed. "Take this PEX crimp. Take this transition coupling. SharkBite. Don't look at the price, just take it. You want to sleep tonight, right?" He piled twelve items into my chest. "You got thread tape?" "I have Scotch tape," I said quietly. He stared at me with pure horror. He marched me to aisle four and slammed a roll of blue Teflon tape into my palm. "Blue. Never yellow. Yellow is gas. If you put yellow on water, your ancestors will weep. If you put blue on gas, you go to heaven early." "Do you work here?" I asked. The man looked deeply offended. "I'm an independent roofing contractor. I came here for six screws." He walked back to his cart, grabbed his screws, and walked toward self-checkout without looking back. I went home. I installed the SharkBites. The leak died instantly. Last Thursday, I was back in aisle eight looking for a shut-off valve. A college kid stood before the copper elbows, holding a ruined plastic pipe, eyes wet with panic. I stopped my cart. I looked at his ruined pipe. Before I could stop myself, the words left my mouth: "What year was the house built?" I am the man in aisle eight now. There are no employees. There is only the chain.