I’m glad I wasn’t there last Saturday when the police showed up at the shoemakers. Do I have your attention? Good. Here is the tale. A customer walks in with a ticket and wants his shoes, except the shoes are not there. The system makes sure nobody can get shoes with a ticket they find in the street. Alfredo does not have the shoes, only the cancelled ticket. The customer calls the police and they file an “incident report”. This horrifies Alfredo, who is as honest and has never had a problem in 21 years.He explains this to me this morning, and although it was only my second day, I remember that pair of shoes. Brown 11-1/2s. This is not adding up because no way could the customer be faking. So I proceeded to look behind everything and then inform Alfredo the shoes were definitely not in the shop. Read to the end of today for the solution to this mystery.
I ran into Marcus at the shopping center. This is the guy who I thought was around twenty years younger than he was, the black dude who had a heart attack and disappeared a few months ago. He is back looking for work, which he will find because he is a good telemarketer. Meanwhile he is totally broke from medical bills. So, nice guy that I am, I did not mention the $200 he owes me.
In a strange coincidence, Mila started getting tons of telemarket calls right after she gave me her phone number. I sure did not give it out to anyone but after the way Nokia and MetroPCS have treated me lately it makes me wonder. There are also a large number of these calls at the shoemaker shop. Alfredo did not know about the no-call list.
Things are otherwise going well at the shoe place. I’m at the stage where I can completely replace soles and heels in batches, as in an assembly line. This practically doubles the income so Alfredo is happy even though I’m slow at certain stages. Such as working the shoe-eating grinder on the west wall. (Yes, I already ruled out that as the culprit.)
Wallace is having a great time puttering around the yard. He’s also lucky the weather turned balmy, if rainy, all this week. I’m just not the guy for yard work, but on the other hand, the garlic potatoes, baked chicken, corn bread and banana-apricot smoothies will be ready in say, 15 minutes.
There’s no real trivia today, but I did find a source that contradicts the rule of always placing quotation marks outside of punctuation. I don’t know which version is correct, so I will stick with the method used in this work. At the same time, I found one of the most contorted examples yet. See the [correct] punctuation marks at the end of this sentence.
“Did you hear him say, ‘I never read “The Raven”’?”
Bear in mind, punctuation is not used in speaking, only to clarify the written word. This sentence obviously goes beyond common sense, and while no educated man would ever put four or more consecutive punctuation marks in his prose, you might note that C++ programmers do it every day.
Okay, back to the missing shoes. At mid-afternoon, the explanation walked in the door. Last Friday, an old friend of Alfredo’s came in, having lost his ticket. He pointed at the shoes, which Alfredo took to be the correct ones. They weren’t, the guy got home and realized he had the wrong pair. He came back to return them. Tsk, tsk, and you thought shoemaking was dull.
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