Excuse Me

"Excuse me."

Other than "pay up", those are the two words I dread hearing the most at work. In my world, "excuse me" usually means something like, "I'm having trouble with the elevator. I can't get to the fifth floor". Well, under the circumstances, that's entirely understandable since, um, there are only four of them, Edna. "Excuse me" is virtually synonymous with "Is all the tile you sell square, or is some of it shaped like diamonds?"

Ponder that while I take another draw on this here diet cola.

Kind of like trying to light the firewood in order to dry it out. Just sayin'. I heard "excuse me" so many times this afternoon, I thought I was getting in the way of a marching band. We're selling several hundred boxes of flooring, currently. For your shopping convenience we've cleverly taped a piece of flooring onto the top of one box per pallet (at approximately twenty-eight boxes per pallet) so the customer will know what he or she is purchasing. At least, that was the plan. Recently, we noticed someone trying to cut his way into one of the boxes with a pocket knife. The reason, of course, was that "Excuse me" wanted, in his own words, to see how different the actual flooring is from the sample piece taped on the demo box". We explain, with as still a voice as one can muster without going Daffy Duck on him, that the sample piece came from one of the boxes of flooring. "Oh", says the somewhat bemused Jerry, who by now now has the attention of other customers fishing through their pockets for their own pocket knives. "Well, tell me this", says Jerry, first lighting, then extinguishing, a cigarette when his wife of 36 years reminds him that this is a no smoking store. "if the demo came from one of the boxes, that means you have one box that's missing a piece. So I get a discount for that box, right?"

Now, trichotillomania isn't my favorite means of dealing with anxiety caused by others, but Jerry is really, really making me reconsider  this nervous disorder. Calmly -oh so calmly, I remind him that the sample piece, when added to the total number of other pieces in the box, equals the total number of pieces necessary to achieve the 22 square feet of flooring as advertised on the end of the box. "But it's a demo piece", says he, trying his best to convince us that the piece somehow taints all the "good" pieces still in the box.

I often find that going to the fourth floor (remember, that's the floor that exists) for a few minutes of solitude is not only liberating, but necessary, for the remnants of my mental health. On the fourth floor, I can take a breather from the Jerries who want us to open another box of flooring and get a "good" piece to replace the tainted demo piece. The fourth floor also has an interesting view of the soda distributing plant and the transportation museum. (Oh, look. They have a Pinto on display over there.)

Still, you can't stay on the fourth floor very long without managers getting steamed about having to deal with Jerry's obsessive-compulsive disorder by themselves. Nor can you blame them. It does tend to be anxiety-provoking when he pressures you to put fourteen other customers on hold while trying your darnedest to make sure that the wood patterns of each piece line up exactly with those of the other 18 pieces in each and every box. That's pretty scary when you consider that we've sold more than fifteen hundred of almost three thousand boxes of this stuff, and let me tell you there are a lot of Jerries out there looking for good deals.

I'm not sure how many more of these transactions I can endure without giving up and living under an overpass somewhere. I'll try to soldier on.

Excuse me.