Etruscans: 1 Gardenia: 0

Okay, so here's the update. I took the faucet back to Home Depot and showed it to the first guy I saw in the plumbing aisle. He remembered me from the last time I was there ... or more likely, he remembered the faucet ... and went to find another guy, Andre, who I had also met before. Andre took one look at my faucet and the mutilated hoses and said "What the heck have you been doing?"

It turns out that Manny gave me the wrong connectors. He gave me a female to female compression nipple (I SWEAR that's what it's called) but unfortunately I needed a female to female ... something else nipple. IU? UI? Some acronym that means do not try to screw a compression threaded piece in here. Well as you can imagine, I put quite a bit of thrust into trying to get the pieces connected yesterday, and now it turns out that I probably stripped the faucet.

(Jeez, stripping and thrust and nipples and female to female connectors ... but I digress.)

Andre helped me out and talked to the manager, so I think that Home Depot is going to replace my faucet, but what a PAIN in the BUTT this has turned out to be.

But here's the thing. I said that I needed a man for the screwing, BUT if the first man I talked to had given me the right advice, I would have been able to do it myself. However, Andre was very helpful, and also not bad looking, so perhaps there's something to be said for the damsel in distress.