Well, the strawberry harvest has started in the FitzGerald garden and didn’t we enjoy it. Next week we hope the tomato will be ready, if the frost ’ get it! Over the coming weeks the spring onion will be ripe and will be served on a thirty pound bed of parsley which now stands at waist height and could be used stuff a mattress let alone garish a chicken! Gardening has never been my strong point but dealing with shop assistants….now that is my forte!
Ratboy, the son and heir, was in need of a new dress shirt so I volunteered to wander into Plymouth and purchase the garment. We entered one particular young and trendy emporium and were ignored for fifteen minutes so we left and entered another department store and received the same treatment. In this one, two assistants were talking about what they did on Friday night and what Friday night did to them and a third seemed to have her head stuck in a sock draw. At least I assumed she was an assistant, from her position and bum cleavage, I did wonder if she was just an advertising hoarding, as her arse was extolling the virtues of industrial strength pants. She could have also been a ‘before’ in a ‘before and after’ cellulite cream programme, which ever, we still didn’t get served. However, it then dawned on me that in order to get noticed theses days in modern retailing with modern assistants, you have to shoplift! At least someone comes up and talks to you and you get a lift home with your bags from social services.
Then I began to wonder if it was me! Were the assistants watching me, too embarrassed to approach and give me the bad news that the only thing they have to fit my frame, is the dust cover from the clothing rack?
So I tried one more shop and this time we made eye contact.
‘I’d like to buy a dress shirt for my son?’
‘What size is he?’
Ratboy stepped forward. ‘I think 15 or 15 and half neck? But he’s slim and the body might not fit so could we try one on just to check!’
‘No.’
‘Not at all!’
‘No! You can on Monday but not on a Saturday.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s busy’, she said to me as I looked at the only other person in the shop who was just about to leave. ‘I could have forty open packets of shirts at the end of the day!’
‘Not with that attitude,’ I said and kissed goodbye to being served with anything.
But without the ability of unscrewing Ratboy’s head and leaving it there till Monday morning, I tried a forth shop. They had a complete range of ‘opened’ dress shirt packs and because they had been opened on a Saturday, and no one could be arsed to put them back, were now discounted by 70%! Result.
This article was made possible by the credit crunch, forcing companies to employ shop assistants that would normally appear on the government’s unemployment statistics.
Fitz
