Uncle Sal and the Lengthy Line (Episode 36)

Uncle Sal stood in line waiting to pay for his snakeskin boots. He removed his sapphire bowler hat, wiped his head with his handkerchief and said to Alice, "What a deal on these boots. Gen-u-wine snakeskin for only thirty-five bucks. You'll never get a better deal than that, I'll tell ya. I dunno about this line though. It's ridiculous. If I weren't gettin' such a good deal, there's no way I'd wait in this line. It reminds me of when I worked at Ditherman's. It was a store just like this one in Piscataway. They moved me from general clerk to menswear and they were training this new guy to take my place as a general clerk. You wanna know what the guy's name was?"

Alice merely looked over her glasses at him and waited to hear the man's name.

"Dieter Krauthammer. Lemme tell ya sumpin'. All that talk about German efficiency, you coulda never proved it by this guy Krauthammer. He was all thumbs. Not only that. He was all left thumbs. I tell ya, I never seen anyone so inept with his hands, and he was only running a cash register. Imagine if he was trying to build furniture."

The person at the front of the line finished paying for his transaction and Uncle Sal and Alice took a step forward. "Seemed like every day ol' Krauthammer was on the register, there was a line at least as long as this. Probably longer."

"Don't be so hard on the guy. Department stores are always crowded and he was just learning."

"Yeah, but that's just it. Even after he'd already learned the deal, he couldn't quite manage to push the right buttons in the right sequence. He'd hack at the thing and then he'd inevitably call for manager assistance. Store prolly lost a lotta business because of his two left hands. I kinda felt bad for the guy. But then I guess that's what happens when you throw a clunky mensch in the clerks."

This episode featured:
Burl Langley as Uncle Sal
Millicent Tilley as Alice
and
Jellybean Merengue as the snakeskin boots.

Tune in next week when Uncle Sal says, "There's what's right and there's what's right and never the twain shall meet."

[15 April 2008]