One Thing After Another

There's a cartoon by Gahan, I forget his first name but he did a lot of cartoons for Playboy and, I believe, the New Yorker in the 1970s, in which two old ladies are walking along one side of the street and on the other two monsters are chasing each other. One old lady says to the other: "These days it's one God damned thing after another."

I bring this up to illustrate a point or two. First of all, after thirty years in business you would think the anniversary sale would be organized, but it isn't. Setting up tables and hors d'oeuvres while customers are greedily grabbing up bottles of supplements and other notions is chaotic and confusing. Common sense, you would think, dictates that if you're serving a product as an hors d'ouvre you would actually have the product in stock. Everyone raved over the key lime pie, but we didn't have any in stock. Mean while, with all this pandemonium going on, we're supposed to be doing our regular Friday routine of order-placing. It's no wonder tempers got short. After thirty years you'd think this would all be, well, organized. It took me most of Saturday to get over the experience of Friday.

Secondly, Summer brings to our fair town a horde of urban campers, that is to say transient homeless people. We have two, at least, down town these days. One aggressively begs for change "for the bus" and the other looks like a Victorian convict straight out of a Charles Dickens novel. The latter hardly says a word but is physically intimidating. The Victorian Convict comes into the store frequently, intimidating customers, shoplifting (at least twice that I'm aware of) and leaving his bowl of urban camper kibble on our doorstep. No one in the upper echelons of management wants to tell the Victorian Convict to leave, so we're to "shadow him" while he's in the store, which seems a perfectly pointless waste of time to me.

So, indeed, some times it does seem like it's one God damn thing after another.

Bush Telegraph Department: Rumour, spreading swiftly, if not necessarily accurately, has it that the proposed New Coffeehouse is going to be a joint venture between the Bookstore Owners and the Waitress. Or perhaps the two businesses will merely be aligning opening and closing times. My sources indicate that the proposed New Coffeehouse owners are looking into the cost of establishing a kitchen in the building. Developments relayed to my Devoted Readers as they occur.

Quotable: "Only with great determination did we find an opium den."