UPDATE: Sears is doing its part to make this magical experience all the more memorable.

In order to find the tool section I had to ask the person at the service desk who first told me that the auto parts and service section had closed in all the Sears stores in the area except for the one San Jose store, and I'd have to go there if I wanted any car parts. Finally as I was on my way out the door and muttering to myself about hardware she said, "Oh, hardware! Yeah, we have a hardware section. Go down the hall, turn right at the big-screen TV, go all the way to the back, turn left at the watch repair, go through the dishwashers and all the way to the far corner."

When I got there, I found someone writing up sale tags and asked him about code readers.

"Code ... readers? Uh... I don't think we carry those."

"Really? They're in the online catalog. Actron? Equis? For reading OBDII codes?"

"I don't know... I've never heard of anything like that."

"So... um... what about those over there?"

"... Oh, CODE readers!"

So in a fit of optimism, I asked him what the advantages of the $179 version are over the $129 one, and so he got out his keys and took them both down so he could read the feature lists off the boxes to me.

Oh, and then on the way back, I took El Camino Real so as to avoid the bumper-to-bumper traffic I'd seen on northbound 101, and instead spent half an hour in construction traffic.

I'm sure I'll look back on all this and laugh someday, or would if any of this made for an entertaining enough story to bother writing down.