Saturday, February 04, 2006

Luka And The Invisible Light Shoes

In the previous post I referred to an analogy that a writer friend made about writing being like robbing a bank. Sometimes with humorous observation pieces it's more like someone else robbing the bank and handing you the loot.

This will be my next Acid Tongue column. It happened to me today. I love it when people do dumb shit. The light shoe lady was in and out of the shop for ages and was quite funny, in a really annoying way, but the column has to be a max of 400ish words, so here tis. Hope you enjoy...

I appeared to have a bit of a credibility problem over the weekend. Someone started buzzing my front door at 4am. I ignored it for as long as I could, but they were so persistent that I thought there was a faint chance that it was someone I knew and not a confused piss-head neighbour. "Is that Luka?" came the unsure query through the handset. I don’t know, maybe I'm too fussy but I just think if you’re buzzing someone’s door at 4am you’d better be fucking sure you’ve got the right number. No it's not Luka, I told them, wrong number. "But I was after Luka." No Luka, go away. "Oh... No Luka?" What part of ‘No Luka’ was he not understanding? There is no Luka, I insisted, do not buzz this number again or I will come down there and make your fingers broken. Then later in the day a woman wandered into the shop I work in on the weekends wanting to look at the shoes we have with the lights built in that flash when you walk. Umm... wot? I assured her that we have some wacky shoes, but none with lights in them that flash when you walk. "My brother, he work in shop next door, he tell me you have shoes with lights that flash when you walk. I want to see these shoes." She had a stupid half-smile of expectation on her face as she looked around the shop. I told her, really, we don’t have any flashing light shoes - why would I lie about such a thing? She brushed by me and homed in on all the shoes that looked like they might possibly have flashy lights built into them. Whatever. I left her to it. After a while she gave up and left, only to return with her brother from the shop next door. He stood at the door and pointed towards the rear of the shop as though that was where we keep the shoes with the flashing lights in them. She marched back in, determined to get to the bottom of this and continued to look for these non-existent flashing light shoes. Like... if I had such shoes in stock, and someone came in and wanted to buy them, why would I hide them? Why the hell did she believe her brother – who was either living in a fantasy world or (more likely) sending her on a wild goose chase to get her out of his hair for a bit – over me?

Fuck me you humans can be weird.

Grumpy

7 comments:

Lee Bemrose said...

I actually did start singing that song to myself while lying there not being able to get back to sleep. My adrenal gland had given me a shot of stuff to keep me just awake, and that fucking song made things worse.

Someone who doesn't know me except through my Grumpy column in Tsunami (and this blog) just said they had me pegged for a Johnny Cash fan. I love singing along to Johnny Cash, and now the song that's stuck in my head is "I fell in to a burning ring of fire, I went down down down, and the flames went higher..."

neena maiya (guyana gyal) said...

LOL bee vee vee

Our phone rings. I answer. The callers asks me, "Hello, who is this speaking?" aaaaaaagggggggghhhh

I need a song for that.

Lee Bemrose said...

Don't be sorry, Clare. It wasn't the existence of the shoes that was the issue, it was her refusal to believe me when I said we don't stock them.

neena maiya (guyana gyal) said...

Quick, I loved that post I read this morning [the one that's gone]...slow isp kept me from commenting.

Lee Bemrose said...

Thanks GG. Don't know where or why it went, but it's back up now (for now). Blogger has been weirding out a lot lately.

Unknown said...

Mr. Quick,
Is that you in those photos on www.psydeways.com??
Yours,
BW

p.s. I don'y mean the ones of the females...

Lee Bemrose said...

Could be.