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[personal profile] edenfalling
Work has been interesting this week. I swear there must be a Law of the Conservation of Insanity, at least as relating to small retail stores. Fay the coffee lady has been the next best thing to officially banned (PM essentially said that if she couldn't stop complaining, she would have to stop coming in, and we haven't seen her since), but we've had a compensating influx of new oddballs.

The most memorable is a woman we call 'Phoebe,' who wanders around in a perpetual daze and has a massive crush on BW. (BW is understandably disturbed by this.) She waves goodbye not to the clerks, but to our ceiling, as if people float up there watching her; it's rather unnerving. Lastly, she seems to bathe in patchouli and other perfumes, to the point where I cannot wait on her for more than about a minute straight without having to run off to the other end of the counter lest I sneeze in her face.

Also, on Friday afternoon a semi-regular customer -- a weather-beaten middle-aged man in a flat-topped cloth hat, who is usually silent as the grave -- came in drunk off his ass, and had an incredibly peculiar 'conversation' with MS, which I will loosely paraphrase for you: He got some tobacco out of the locked tobacco corridor, then leaned on the counter and said, "I'm enjoying--" and made vague full-arm gestures toward the front windows. "Happens around Thanksgiving. Your people call it-- my people-- THAW!"

(MS later told me she was utterly lost for several seconds, because she misheard him as saying 'Thoth,' and could not for the life of her figure out what Egyptian gods had to do with anything.)

"Gotta plant that corn. And tobacco!" said the customer.

"Yes, the weather is warmer lately," MS said. "Like in November, but it's February now."

"We don't exist until Thanksgiving," said the man. Neither MS nor I could figure out any rational response to that, so we ignored it. Fortunately, the customer lost track of that thought as fast as he'd lost track of his previous ones.

MS finished ringing up his transaction and said, "Well, enjoy the thaw."

The customer walked toward the door, then stopped, turned, and said, "Enjoy your taxes!"

"I'm trying?" MS said.

"No, you're frying!" he said. Laughed. Paused. "Governor Paterson!"

MS gave me a 'what the hell is going on?' look. I was trying to ring up another customer, who also seemed uncomfortable, and I kind of shrugged. I was just as lost as she was.

So MS said, "Take care," in a 'please go away now' tone of voice.

"I need all the hair I can get!" said the customer, laughing. Then he finally left.

We think, in retrospect, he was initially trying to say that he had Native American heritage and his people are ignored except around Thanksgiving -- which does, sadly, have some truth to it. But mostly he was just really, really drunk -- MS said she could smell alcohol swimming in the air around him.

---------------

In other news, I am fiddling away at the next bit of my sequential Aravis-marries-Cor ficlets, and also picking at "The Corners of the World," which is my explanation of how Jadis got from the end of MN to the start of LWW. The thing is, what Jadis did in Calormen had a significant impact on how Calormene politics and religion developed, and I need to know that for later on in "The Courting Dance."

World-building is so much fun it should probably be illegal. *grin*

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edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
Elizabeth Culmer

July 2025

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