It was a dead day for business. A lot of new people came through today, it was enough to keep the day interesting. For example, this tiny lady came in with a carload of fashion clothes with the price tags attached. How you interpret that will determine your kindness to humankind. She was a kleptomaniac. Wrong, she had lost 62 pounds and held on to the clothes for long enough to make sure she kept the weight off.
I asked her the secret. She said hypnosis. It worked for her, she was smaller than Robyn in her prime. Classic hourglass waist. Jerry was in with his new girlfriend, we piled a queen size mattress and box-spring on top of his jeep. He had never seen an MP3 player in action, so I downloaded every Marty Robins hit in existence. Attempted to download, that is. Around twenty didn’t make it by closing time.
Maybe I’ll run another ad for this material. I tend to forget that most people my age do not even know what an MP3 is. Jerry is still not 100% convinced he was listening to my player, an old 256K model by RCA. He had to believe because he chose which tunes I would download. You’d still have to see the look on his face.
A man brought in six boxes of ancient but brand new in the wrapper LPs. He reminded me of Mike from LA, who often ordered things he never remembered and sometime never opened. He had a living room full of boxes and UPS trucks pulling up every other day. I lost track of Mike when Shirley [his mother] passed away in around 1992. Most of them are unplayed. I went through and sadly have to report the guys taste in 1960s music did not cover the Beatles. That would have been a find.
Sales were so light I burned a copy of The Full Monty off a VHS. I like the dance moves when ordinary looking people do them, plus my opinion is that it was an original idea for a movie in an age starved for novelty. This is all going on while this lady is buying a bible for a dollar and inviting me to call her for spiritual discussion. Jerry and I had been talking about Ian Paisley, who apparently he knows and used to visit in Northern Ireland.
Last, a lady came at closing time and we got to talking. Be damned if she does not work at a certain private department and has access to, shall we say, files like you would not believe. She is not keen on the way she has been treated there. We’ve made an arrangement, I teach her how to do SQL searches, and she practices on the list of words that I supply her. This could be a major break, for I am the master pattern-matcher of all time, such a handy talent around computers. If it is what I think it is, I will have better information than the police or the tax man because people themselves will have supplied it, yet to anyone else, the results look like random dates and times.
She had just dumped her last boyfriend for sheer stupidity. Get this. The guy was 48 years old and responded to some Nigerian scheme for easy money. They send you an official-looking check. The deal is you get the cash from a check store, that is, you don’t deposit it into your account. The check is apparently for $5,000. You send them $2,000 and keep the other $3,000. Great deal until the check bounces. She tried to save him by successfully tracing the cell number of the contact and turning them in to the FBI. However, the boyfriend was so dumb he cashed a second check. Anyway, her ability to trace that cell number was what got us to talking.
I’ve decided what type of ferns to plant in front of my picture window. Carrots. That is correct, ordinary carrots. The pineapple is growing but it has not yet put down any roots. Wallace reports seeing giant pineapple in Hawaii that were four feet tall and four feet around, being used as ornamental yard plants. For the record, the electric company wants $110 deposit for this joint. The bill is not in my name, screw them on that one, like I would be dumb enough to give that information to a public utility! I also notice the other people here do not specify their unit number on the mail. Good plan these days.
One of the customers found a drum machine in the back. The batteries had corroded on the inside, but the power transformer was intact. I’m checking it out later tonight.
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