Normally a day at the shop isn’t exciting material, but today gets top billing. This is most people’s first glimpse at the things that can go wrong at the shoemaker’s. It all started last week and came home to roost. First of all, in any place with tools you sometimes have to use one tool to repair another even though they are not really designed for that. A “maleta” is a hammer that looks like a toy, I used it to fix a jig and the maleta disappeared. Two of us looking for twenty minutes, increasingly frustrated and incredulous.
Turns out I had set it on a nearby ledge that was exactly eye-level for the both of us. When you looked at it, all you saw was the base of the handle and the rest of it did not register. The both of us could not see it for looking. After giving up, I rested my elbow right on it. Then a customer comes in with a rush order and we split the work, except one of the patterns got turned upside down. We both wound up cutting two lefts and two rights of the wrong shape. That’s $30 worth of leather lost on a $22 job.
Wait, there’s more. In comes a pair of CFM boots from last week. We had repaired them to perfection, why are they back? Turns out the customer wanted leather soles instead of rubber and neither of us remembered seeing that on the ticket. By now it is mid-day and we need a breather from this.
We stop for lunch only to find that all of our sandwiches are covered with Florida crazy ants. We laughed ourselves silly. This isn’t a job situation with division of labor and hourly wages, it is a shop where all suffer if a daily profit isn’t forthcoming. Once we got back to work, the rest of the day was fine. There you have it, a perfect criteria for a TV sitcom. This concludes your peek behind the scenes at a shoe place.
I did tell you how boring life becomes once you work for a living, and I realize these recent entries are confirming that. The computer biz is picking up and soon I’ll have a budget for extra-curriculars again. Don’t dismay, money always makes American life more interesting. I suppose that could be because most adults have already done all the free things in life. I’d really like to get over this quiet stretch myself.
If all this bores you, remember that since I can’t read your account of the day, I have nothing to judge by. Fact is, I had little else on the brain by evening except to get back here to a pot of coffee and a book. And I’ve really read all of the roughly 200 books and magazines I keep on hand several times each. If I didn’t say, the used book store reopened out near Barry University. That’s too far to travel for a casual look around. It is also chancy since the non-fiction selection can be sparse and dated.
Not wishing to leave you empty-handed, here is one of those ideas that will go nowhere. Imagine all the apartments and efficiencies within fifty miles of here that do not have an ocean view. There is nothing else to see in Florida. Here’s my brainstorm. You hang a big screen TV along one of the blank walls. Then you subscribe to my service. I have a series of high-quality video web cams set up in choice locations around the planet. Now this TV is specially designed to look like a picture window, with drapes and such. For a reasonable monthly fee, you can have a luxury view of anything on-line.
Say you want the view from a Los Angeles penthouse. Or the top of the Eiffel Tower. How about the beach walk in Ft. Lauderdale? The Alps? Main Street? This live, moving picture emulates looking out your window at just about any scene imaginable. I know there are similar cameras mounted here and there, but this might be the first commercial venture of its kind. Maybe it isn’t the most inspired plan. However I did come up with it in less than two minutes.
Last, what is it with the kerfuffle in Scotland, where they released the Lockerbie bomber because he was sick? The British, Scot and US Government got their nuts in an uproar and I don’t understand the problem. It turns out, for some reason inexplicable to me, they didn’t want the terrorist to die in a Scottish jail. What the? See what happens when you’ve got too many useless politicians? I mean, who cares where a terrorist dies, as long as he dies. Asinine diplomacy at its worst. Let the guy rot in obscurity and mention his death in the obits. This one I do not blame on the media, look no further to see what happens when politicians feel no obligation to respect the will of the people.
