Standing motionless before forty feet of galvanized steel bins, local 34-year-old Mark Teller reportedly closed his eyes Tuesday and began silently begging the universe for the exact machine screw he needed to spontaneously manifest in his palm.
Witnesses at the local Home Depot reported that Teller had been paralyzed before the specialty fastener section for nearly twenty minutes, clutching a stripped, unidentifiable piece of metal he had extracted from a broken desk chair. Confronted with a sprawling wall of hex bolts, carriage bolts, lag screws, and toggle bolts, and possessing absolutely zero knowledge of thread pitch or metric sizing, Teller apparently concluded that his only viable path forward was a localized miracle.
Surveillance footage from the aisle showed the man briefly attempting to match his broken hardware against several sealed plastic baggies. After failing to decipher a label reading M8-1.25 x 40mm, Teller was seen sighing heavily, dropping his arms to his sides, and tilting his head upward into the fluorescent lighting. Bystanders noted he appeared to be bargaining with a higher power, offering to be a better husband and father if only a pan-head machine screw of the exact requisite length would simply drop from the rafters.
We get about six or seven guys a day who reach the metric drawer, realize they don't know what a millimeter looks like, and just surrender their will to the cosmos.
At press time, Teller’s spiritual petition had reportedly gone unanswered, prompting him to grab a random blister pack of wood screws that looked roughly the same length as his thumb. He was last seen walking toward the checkout registers, having made peace with the fact that his home office chair would simply lean dangerously to the left for the remainder of its existence.