Nanowrimo 2018 - day 26

Daily word count:  935

Total word count:  48,036

I shushed a man today.

I was trying to buy an item from a store catalogue. I had tried my local store and found they had none on the shelves, there was none in stock (out the back), they couldn’t order it in for me, and couldn’t get it sent over for me from another store that they could tell from their ever so convenient computer system had TWO of the item I wanted.

Note that there was a good dozen of those ‘take this tag to the cashier’ tags. It sure looked like they had them for sale.

“Why was it in the catalogue, then?” I asked the cashier.

The man rolled his eyes.

“Story of your life, eh?” I supplied.

He told me which stores had stock. I worked out which one was closest to me, and the next morning I phoned it to make sure they still had the item.

When the man answered the phone and asked what I wanted, I said, “I’m just checking if you still have an item from the most recent catalogue.”

I expected him to say a lot of things, what I did not expect him to say, was, “What’s a catalogue?”  %$

I explain.

Everyone in the room is now actively listening.

He put me on hold.

Now, while I’m on hold, I’m processing the conversation and I get that what he is doing is asking someone which department to put me through to, to help with my enquiry about catalogues.

Oh, dear. We’ve gone seriously awry here.

I wait…

He comes back on the line and he launches into a hurried explanation about how he doesn’t know which department deals with catalogues, and I say, “Shush.” I honestly didn’t know how else to stop him.

He stops talking.

Every head in the room turns.

“Wearable fitness items,” I say very clearly. &&

He puts me through without another word.

Kid 2 looks at me. “Mum… you shushed someone.”

I explained. I had to stop him before he wasted more of his time.

Look, I don’t know… Maybe it was his first day; maybe the call interrupted him doing something else; maybe he hadn’t had enough coffee. I know I hadn’t - it was early-ish. Maybe he was tired of people calling about that particularly rare and half priced item?

%$ what SHOULD I have called it? Mail out? Junk mail? I don’t know.

&& New step counter. That cow stole at least 2 kilometres from me in the last 12km hike that it swore was only 10km long. It’s going in the bin.