Hey! I’m back!
I’m in the US again so this blog has risen from the dead. Braaaaiiiiiiiins…
Today I had an experience that was almost as amusing as it was annoying.
North east Missouri, thursday afternoon, sweltering heat, I walk into a junk shop called ‘Miss Piggy Porky’s Junk Emporium’. It’s an old auto shed, pilled to the hot tin roof with old bird cages, silver serving platters, horse saddles, broken vcrs and orange and brown 1970s tupperwear. Amongst the rubble I spy a hand carved wooden box that I like – what will I put in it? I don’t know, but it has shell inlays!
It’s four dollars and I must have it.
I walk up to the counter and hand the box to Ms. Porky who punches some buttons, tries to convince me to buy some ugly jewellery to fill it with and informs me that my total is $4.31. Oh yeah… tax.
So I hand her a twenty and she starts punching buttons on the till.
431 from 200… no, 4.31 from 200… what? 4 3 1 from 2000… 200… 200.0 from 4.31... no
“Oh just wait on hon, I gotta figure this here out, darn thing don’t work worth a damn.” Her syllables double themselves: tha-ang, day-amn.
She busts out a calculator.
“It’s $15.69″
“What’s that hon?”
“$15.69, my change”
“Oh sure hon, I just gotta figure this out… won’t take but a minute.”
I settle in.
Three minutes later she manages to press some order of buttons which prompts the calculator to display ‘15.69′ and she decides that that’s the right answer. Good, but wait right there – giving me my change and figuring it out on her own time would be way to logical, she needs to make the till agree before she touches that cash.
At this point I’ve been standing at the till for at least seven minutes, it’s over 30C and I really just want my twenty back so I can leave, but then something miraculous happens:
“CLETUS! Git over here ‘n help me with this damn thing”
Cletus… I know, right?
Ms. Porky has no teeth and can’t do basic math, and Cletus is covered in faded tattoos, wearing a wife beater and a truckers cap that are as filthy as him. He has perhaps three teeth more than his wife (Porky’s falsies, I notice, are sitting by the darn till).
They start arguing.
I was literally biting my tongue to stop myself from snorting with laughter.
It’s like… I really don’t think I am that judgemental a person, but you see characters like them in Harold and Kumar and The Simpsons. Not in real life.
When you come across them in fiction you laugh, but you also feel lied to because they are clearly an exaggeration, a caricature of real people. Coming accross them in real life was a shock. A blogworthy shock.
