Mothers Day

Today is mothers day and we had the usual dribble of people through the doors, one of my favourites would be Flo, who, every Sunday waddles through the door and stops precisely in the same spot, in front of the till and waits.
Sometimes I play with the situation and stand there pretending to be oblivious to what she does, waiting for her to tell me what she wants.
But every week is the same; "two Sunday papers Kate," then she waits for me to go and get them, it is only a 2 metre walk from the till to the papers, however she expects me to go and get them for her, like I am her slave, not to mention the fact that my name is actually Katie. I find her extremely rude, but I always smile with indignation, she doesn't seems to notice.
Another Sunday regular is old Sid, who is pushing 90, a tiny old man. Short and thin as a rake, who would blow over in a breeze, he has but one tooth which sticks proudly out the front and a thick tuft of yellowish white hair which he combs back, he shuffles in ever so slowly, after getting off his little red motorised buggy.
Now even though he calls me Kay, I don't mind getting his paper for him, bringing it closer to the door, he is a gentleman and George has a lot of time for him and beside that we would be here until sunset if I had the patience to wait for him to get it, I fold it in half for him because I know that he isn't strong enough to do it himself, I pass it to him, he pays me and he tucks it under his arm, wishes us a good day and off he shuffles again.

The all time classic for today would have to be a middle aged man who wanders into the shop, not to buy anything, but to ask a question:
"Is next door open?"
Ah, OK... I have no idea I am in MY shop! How about you go and have a look! I was dumbfounded and George just looked at me in shock.
I politely suggested that he go and have a look. Why would you walk into a shop to find out if another shop was open, wouldn't you just try to go into the shop that you wanted to in the first place?
When I went outside to pull down the roller doors to lock up for the day and looked across to the take-away it was clearly open, their windows were open, the lights were on and it was full of people. It amazes me.

Another beauty was when someone walked in and informed us that the petrol station had run out of fuel. Now this is quite funny just on its own, a petrol station with no petrol, except that this is a regular occurrence.
'Dirty Dot' as the kids in town have affectionately named her, has the monopoly on fuel around here, it is the only place to get petrol for either 70 or 140kms depending on which way your going.
And Dellaren isn't the most exciting place to be stranded, the only place to stay is in the pub... or your Winnebago, if you should be so lucky, however you won't find anywhere to park it bar a truck bay, unless you want to try your luck down by the river, on the trail to the mission/reserve/camp, in the pitch black darkness of the night...
The locals are usually able to work manage to keep enough fuel in their cars to get to somewhere else to fuel up, not only does she frequently run out of fuel, she is expensive and extremely abrupt. I know people who will do almost anything to avoid going in there.
Being a business owner it is quite amusing that the basic principal of customer service is not being utilised, I know how difficult it is to be polite when people are rude, but I do it anyway. Rumour has it that she is not paying her bills which is why she is running out of fuel, everyone thinks she is going broke, she has also been accused of being greedy as she never changes the price except to put it up. She doesn't seem to comprehend if she lowered her margin but increased her turnover she would make more money.

I have to admit that I am a nameist, I find that as a broad generalisation it rings true, by this I mean I use people's names to judge them going on experiences of people I have met with the same name.
One example is Ken, my Aunt married a Ken who was a horrible man, short, fat with rosy cheeks and a glint in the eye that you just don't trust, she was blind to the way he looked at young girls, the tantrums he threw when things didn't go his way, or if somebody ate one of his Paddle pops or read 'his' daily paper before him, even if it was 3 o'clock in the afternoon. I can't explain it but I was never really a fan of Barbies Ken either.
Today a Ken came into the shop, another short fat man who rolls around. He only comes in to buy a Sunday paper and to order some medicine, for some reason we feel used by this sort of customer, hard to explain.
Flo is another one of these, we know exactly which people come in purely for this purpose and nothing else.
Today he was doing both, he bought his paper, then started saying he wanted some Progout, it took me 30 seconds to realise what he was on about, I was thinking to myself, what is progout? I don't sell that... then the light came on, I went to the box and pulled out the scripts ticked off the one he wanted and told him that there wasn't a script for the other one he wanted.
To which he started verbally abusing me, he only gets his them here so I will have to ring up the pharmacy and find out what was going on, the box told him that he had 5 repeats left yada yada yada.
I simply said to him, No, you will have to call the pharmacy and ask them, it has nothing to do with me, he was very off-put and said he would go home and get the box to show me. I told him to do that.
He came back 20 minutes later, a little sheepish, and apologised, holding the script in his hand. He had in fact ordered it though another pharmacy.