Between You, Me and the Lamp
Post
Day 29: Life's little bloopers
People often wonder if there’s
intelligent life ‘out there’. The question is, is there intelligent life here on
earth?
For instance …
I was at the mall yesterday.
I had a nail appointment at 3:00 p.m. and since I was a bit early, I was
killing time by looking into store windows.
I came across one store with
a selection of golf shirts. I stopped and had a closer look.
A woman passed me, went into
the store and started speaking to a man. The man in question was dressed in
shorts and a golf shirt, wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses. He sat slightly
hunched over on a box, had earphones in, and seemed engrossed in something on
his cellphone in his hands.
The woman approached him and
said, “Excuse me.”
When there was no reaction
from the man, she repeated, “Excuse me.”
When the man didn’t respond
she became a little agitated and persisted with, “Excuse me, do you work here?
I need some help.”
Still no reaction.
With another “Excuse me,”
she touched him lightly on the shoulder. That's when she realized what I had
known all along … the seated man was a dummy, a mannequin!
After a quick look over her
left and right shoulder, she made a swift exit. Nobody had seen that, right.
While I admit that some women’s elevator doesn’t
quite go to the top, there are dumb men too. I should know, I met one the other
day.
I went to the mailroom, to pick up some documents
from one of four multi-purpose copiers and found a man staring at one of the
machines. It was quite obvious that he had a problem.
While waiting for my documents to finish printing, I
kept an eye on him.
He placed some papers in the top tray, tapped them
lightly so they were nicely lined up, pushed one button and then another button
and then waited. When nothing happened, he let out a long sigh and removed the
papers.
He went through the process again, placing the paper
in the top tray, making sure they were lined up properly, followed by a push of
two buttons. When the machine remained dead still, the man’s frayed nerves got
the better of him. He did what so many people do in a stressful situation … he
started talking to the machine.
“What’s the matter with you, you stupid thing,” he
mumbled. “The papers are there, I pushed the buttons, now start faxing!”
“Problem?” I enquired politely.
“I don’t know what this stupid thing wants,” he
turned to me, while helplessly raising his arms the way a bird would flap his
wings. “I’ve tried three times now and this machine just doesn’t want to fax.”
“Can you show me?” I asked. “Maybe you’re forgetting
a step.”
“I feed the papers in the tray like so,” he demonstrated,
placing the documents for the fourth time in the top tray, “I make sure they’re
all lined up, then I hit the Fax button and then the Start button.
“Are you sure you have the right fax number?” I
wondered.
“Fax number?” he said with a frown.
“The number of the recipient,” I said. “The person
you’re sending the fax to.”
We both looked at the printer/scanner/fax’s
computerized screen and we both knew right away what the problem was … no
number had been keyed in.
If this had been a blond woman, and a man had
witnessed such a mistake, she’d never heard the end of it. Fortunately for the
man, I have a more discreet nature, although I must say, feeling a giggle
tugging on my jaw muscles, I’ve never left the mailroom in quite such a hurry.
