Stereo Installed & Harbor Freight Down

I installed an aftermarket stereo in my car yesterday. Had never done that before but it turned out to be fairly straightforward. I had to get a dashboard kit so that it would fit and I made sure to get one with included wire harnesses so I could solder the new stereo's wire harnesses to that then just plug it in rather than cutting into the factory default wires. I used heat shrink butt connectors since I had those and didn't have wire nuts laying around. I didn't have a heat gun so I used a candle to melt the solder and shrink the tubes. After I got the radio installed and the dashboard all put together I realized I forgot to plug in the antenna wire so I had to take it all apart again! The antenna wire was quite short and was a challenge to get plugged in. The whole process wasn't too difficult but it took quite a while, especially after dropping a screw and a socket into the well and trying to find and fish those out using a magnet glued to an old telescoping antenna.

There have been several times when a heat gun would have really come in handy so today I went to Harbor Freight to pick one up and return some nail nippers I bought a couple weeks ago which ended up not being able to nip any of the nails I tried. The guy who helped me was having a challenging time with the return due to their new computer system. Any gift card under $10 can be cashed out and this return was under $10 but it was still making him put the refund on a gift card, and on a new gift card, not the original one which we first tried with. So then I had 3 Harbor Freight gift cards. I went over and grabbed the heat gun and checked out but their system was having problems once again and wouldn't recognize any of the gift cards. It kept giving different error messages but the primary one was that the service was down. In the end they were unable to process any gift cards and suggested I try again later so I left without my heat gun and free pack of AAA batteries. I called later in the afternoon to see if it was working yet but it was not.