I have this great job selling popcorn, pretzels, pizza and sandwhiches to people. We also sell fountain drinks. While many of my customers appear to be frequent visitors–I’m tempted to ask one guy “If I wanted to come see you where you work, where would I look for you?”–others are grabbing drinks and such for the first time. It is apparently not obvious to all that I hand you a cup, you pay, and then you fill your own cup with your choice of Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Dr. Pepper, Diet Coke or Coke (or several others, assuming we’ve got syrup for them all.)
Failure to notice this does not make you dumb. Telling your friend that she shouldn’t be too picky about the amount of ice in her drink may–or at least it makes you funny. Look, I don’t see much point in interrupting you to explain that no, I don’t care if you want Coke or Pepsi (or Red or Blue Slurpee), when just listening lets me grab the information I need from your conversation.
Making you really funny–offering me a tip. Look, this is a rare place which hasn’t instituted a tip jar for minimum wage employees serving food–let’s keep it that way.
Also making you funny–complaining because the Organic Macaroni and Cheese gets cooked in the microwave.
And making you dumb as well as funny–getting mad at me because I tell you that the pretzels in the display case are made of plastic, and are not intended for sale. A remarkable number of people think they are real, most don’t get mad, but some do.
Somebody at work was stamping forms that had to be photocopied with a stamp “Original Do Not Use”. The stamp was to be on a removable post it note, that you could remove before copying. As it was people had to white out the stamp before making copies. The stamp was not in a place you could just cover over with paper.
Back in the summer I was 16, two friends and I decided to head over to the local college where a number of female high school students from Quebec were staying in residence and studying on a summer program. We figured we’d try to pick up a few–they didn’t know our city and we did, after all; and they were French, too. Ooh la la! (Hey, we were 16, remember. Our idea of “French girls” wasn’t based on anything approximating reality.) Problem was, only one of us spoke fluent French. He was a student at a French immersion school and had spent a lot of time in Quebec, so there was no question about his French skills. He assured us he’d have no problems with the language. Or with his nerves.
So no problem; he would do the talking. But what about? We decided we’d knock on residence doors and he would ask for a match–it was the 1970s, everybody smoked, and if we had cigarettes but no light, they’d be sure to have one, right? This way, we could get a foot in the door, so to speak, in an attempt to pick them up.
So we go up to a door, all of us with unlit cigarettes. Greg practiced his phrases a couple of times in a whisper: “Avez-vous une allumette? J’ai besoin d’une allumette…” (“Have you got a match? I need a match…”) And we knocked.
The door was opened by a stunning breathtakingly-beautiful young lady. “Oui?” she asked. Taken a bit aback by her looks, Greg nervously held up his cigarette and delivered his line:
“Avez-vous un … match?”
The girl stifled a giggle. “Non!” she said, and closed the door. From behind it, we could hear much female giggling and laughing. Obviously, the young lady had friends over.
We tucked our tails between our legs and headed back, French girl-less, to our own neighbourhood. I guess it was us who were both funny and dumb that night.
When in college I worked at Service Liquors. Our manager (The Big Cheese) was a pretty funny guy. I remember one time someone was writing out a check, and asked how to spell the store’s name. TBC calmly spelled: S-E-R-V-I-C-E F-A-T-H-E-A-D.
The customer dutifully wrote it out, and only when done said, "Service Fathead!"
Funny how such a small thing can stick with you, but I can still hear the tonein her voice 25 years later.
(He got his nickname one time when he stopped by the store after having ended his shift and going across the street to tip a few. The phone rang and he picked it up genially saying, “This is the Big Cheese!” The caller said, “This is [Store owner’s name] - who in the hell is THIS?!” TBC promptly hung up, and when the owner called back the guy who answered pled complete ignorance and denied the phone had rung in hours. That was a fun place to work.)
I called my Dad today and told him the story in the OP. He laughed and told me one in turn. He said when he and Mom were first married, they used to hang out at a particular bar with their friends. They went often enough for the bartender to know who they were and what they drank (beer).
So one evening they walked in and took a table, and the bartender automatically sent the waitress over with two beers. My dad, an outgoing guy, smiled at the waitress and said “You must be clairevoyant!” Her response:
A few years ago we were in Ronda, Spain, checking out the bullring that’s there. I was translating for her some of the various touristy fun facts posted here and there, and I told her that Ernest Hemingway lived in Ronda and based his bullfighting book on his experiences living there. (As well as basing the “throwing people off a bridge” passages from For Whom The Bell Tolls on the bridge in Ronda where the Spanish did exactly that to the Moors).
Anyway, after telling her that, she asked me “didn’t they make that book into a movie?”
Not remebering whether Death In The Afternoon was ever filmed, I said “I don’t know - I don’t think so.”
Her response: “Yes they did - it’s that silly movie that your Dad loves!”
After recovering from my spasms of laughter, I calmly explained to her that Dad’s favorite movie didn’t have anything to do with bulls, and was in fact about World War II.
