True story:
"But I gave you a twenty."
Gave me a twenty? I don't think so.
"But I gave you a twenty." The scary redneck woman splatters her $1.98's worth of change on the counter and demands more. I explain to her that no, she's incorrect; five dollars minus three dollars and two cents worth of chewing tobacco (don't ask- I sure didn't) is, in fact, one ninety-eight.
"But I gave you a twenty."
I try showing her the receipt. It states, in no uncertain terms, that she gave me a five dollar bill.
"But I gave you a twenty."
"Fine." I open my drawer. Peering inside, my suspicions are confirmed:
She did not, approximately one hundred seconds ago, hand me a twenty dollar bill.
How do I know this?
There are no twenties in my drawer.
I patiently explain this to her.
"But I gave you a twenty."
I attempt to tell her that according to pure logic, not to mention the laws of physics, if there are no twenties in my drawer, then it is impossible - not possible - cannot be that she gave me a twenty.
"But I gave you a twenty."
I show her the drawer. No twenty. Where's the twenty? Nowhere. It does not exist anywhere, except in her nasty little mind.
"Well you damn well better find it."
Epochs pass. Ice ages come and go. I die and am reborn time and time again, with every lifetime my karma forcing me to come stand there behind the counter and listen to the refrain: BUT
I
I GAVE
I GAVE BUT GAVE I BUT YOU I GAVE
Finally, she waddles outside. Am I free?
Duh. Of course not. She returns. With The Husband.
"She gave you a twenty," The Husband bellows most masculine.
Did I mention ice ages are passing? I may have.
Finally, they up the stakes. They ask to see...
The Manager.
"Ain't here," I croak. Having spent the last twelve millennia with no human contact other than these... um, folks, I seem to be adopting their speech.
Ick. Scrape my brain clean with a rusty can opener.
Anyway, I explain that The Manager will return promptly at six a.m., and these two folks should take their grievances up with the manager at that time.
"Six a.m.," the man takes a chaw of his wife's tobaccer. "You mean six in the morning, or in the evening?"
Hamm, my coworker here at this Inconvenience Store, seems surprised when I black out. He thinks that by now, I ought to be used to this sort of thing.
True story:
It's grocery day. I am stocking the shelves. Presently, I am putting up a box of Tampax brand tampons (which, for reasons I won't go into, are kept in between the mini-salad shooter keychains and the diet ketchup soda).
I notice the company's slogan emblazened on the box. It consists of two words: Women Know.
Funny, I always thought things trademarked had to be unique. Something people in expensive suits got paid way too much money to sit around thinking up. Something not, for example, as mundane, as commonplace, as "women know".
Below the slogan, in microdot form, is a warning. It says:"Women know is a registered trademark of the Tampax corporation. Any women caught knowing anything, professing to know anything, or otherwise having knowledge without the express written permission of the Tampax corporation will be prosecuted for copyright violation."
Okay, so I made that up. But still... you get my point, right? Next thing you know, someone's going to trademark the alphabet. Then we won't be able to write anything without getting sued.
Hey, now, that's an idea...
True story:
It's like, 2 a.m. I answer the phone. "Hey, dude," the guy says. "This is The Bar."
Up the street from the store, there is a bar which I will call The Bar (trust me, that's infinitely more imaginative than its real name).
"This is The Bar," the guy says. "You got eight thousand dollars worth of fives you can spare?"
I should point out that I loathe The Bar. It is the source of fifty percent of the drunks that bug me all day, all night. If The Bar were on fire, I'd dance round the ashes. I point this out to the guy, along with the fact that at 2 a.m. I keep less than 35 dollars in the drawer.
"Oh," the guy says. "Well, we need some fives, and Clayton thought you might have some."
I wince. Clayton is an employee of this store, a man who works here, along with ten other jobs, yet somehow manages to blow his entire paycheck each week at The Bar's illegal poker machine. Clayton's job here is to stand around and flirt with the idiotic teenage girls who try to pass hundred dollars bills off at me. He's heard me scream that, like at all Inconvenience Stores, I keep thirty-five bucks in my drawer.
Obviously, he is plastered. I yell at the guy to tell Clayton to get the hell off the poker machine, and then I hang up.
Ten minutes later, I am on the phone again.
"Hello? Police? Yes, there's a drunk in my beer cooler... well, no actually, he's not stealing anything, he's stocking it... well, I think he thinks he's supposed to be on the clock right now... well, he is an employee... no, actually, I'm fine with this; means I don't have to stock it... well, see, the problem is, if Clayton's here, than the illegal poker machine at The Bar must be rigged, again, and he's blown his entire paycheck already, it's only 2 a.m..."
The police will now tool it over to The Bar. It's one thing to run an illegal gambling establishment in Tennessee.
It's another thing - bloody unforgiveable, by their standards - to have the machines rigged so no one can win. That ticks the cops off.
"Your death will make happiness possible for millions of Jay's braincells for at least three seconds." I don't know. It's something I used to chant at Margot, my girlfriend.
"I have to leave the country - I've just been elected Queen of Canada." It's the last thing Margot said to me.
I called the Tennessee-Canada Relations Committee yesterday, to ask them if I married Margot, would that make me King of Canada?
They replied. And I told them I didn't think a moose would fit in that particular bodily orifice.