I spend an inordinate amount of time complaining to my friends over email and Skype about the annoyances of my days in the shop. Rude customers, people who obliviously walk through the gate at five minutes to closing, even people who open the gate after I've closed it. Retail is stressful and emotionally taxing. And great material for my future book.
Woman 1 was heading toward the bathroom at the same time that Woman 2 was coming out of it. Woman 2 paused a moment in the doorway with her hand on the switch plate. "Are you coming to use the toilet?" she asked Woman 1, who nodded. Woman 2 remained in the doorway a moment longer. "I was just trying to decide if I should keep the fan on." She smiled. "I'll leave that up to you, though. Enjoy!"
One woman who came in was just the most perplexingly clueless customer I've ever encountered. She first asked if "that pie plate out there" was safe to bake with, pointing in the general vicinity of the yard. Then she wanted to know if you could put liquid in the mugs. I nodded slowly. Muttering something like, "What a great idea!" (coffee mugs that hold coffee! Genius!), she wandered off into the yard to look at berry bowls. While she was gone a man and his wife started a pile on the desk: a teapot, two cups, and a mug which, for some reason, the man placed upside-down on the table. Then they went off to look for more and the clueless woman returned. She saw the couple's pile and pointed to the cups. "What might you use those for?" she asked. I stared at her a moment, convinced that she was joking. She wasn't. "They're teacups," I answered. "Ahhh," she said, as if I'd just solved the Riddle of the Sphinx. "And what"--she pointed to the upside-down mug--"is that...the teapot?" Now, I don't claim to be the most intelligent person who ever lived, and I'm certainly not in the habit of thinking myself smarter than anyone else, but I am most assuredly smarter than that loon. Stupidity of that magnitude is just overwhelming.
I was hanging out with Janet during one of her shop days when a middle-aged man came in looking for the bathroom. "That blue door there on the left," Janet told him. He tipped his hat and exclaimed, "Uptown!"
In a round raised planter near the entrance to the shop yard Syd planted a ring of red dahlias. The other day I was engaged in my newest favorite pastime--eavesdropping on customers' conversations from my upstairs bed nook--and I heard a woman musing to her husband about the flowers. "Jimmy," she started, "look at these tiny red flowers! What do you s'pose those are, Jimmy?" (Reads plant stake.) "Oh, dahlias! They're dahlias, Jimmy! Can you believe that? Those little tiny red flowers are dahlias! Dahlias! Well, I never!" (In case you were curious, yes, apparently people actually say that.)
A group of woman asked this man to take a picture of them near the base of the treehouse. He got them all assembled and in the buildup to the taking of the photo he said, "Okay, everybody say 'whiskey!'"
Yesterday a woman came in asking to use the restroom. "It's that blue door there on the left," I told her, pointing toward a short corridor. She peered through the entryway and gave me a strange look. "This right here?" She was pointing to the white and green-striped curtain separating the shop from the kitchen and studio. Yes, I wanted to say, the one that is neither blue nor a door.
"How old are you?" one man asked as he was paying for his pottery. I grinned. "How old do I look?" "Um..." he paused a moment, clearly trying to find the most delicate way to tell me that I look prepubescent. "It's okay," I assured him, "I guarantee that whatever you're about to say, I've heard worse." He seemed to relax a bit. "Okay, then. Seventeen?" I was delighted. Sure, I might be eight years older than that, but seventeen boosts my average! At this point, I'll gladly take anything over sixteen.
This too.
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