High school summers and school time Saturdays meant working at a gardening store. I worked with a hopper, scale, and sewing machine, metering out bags of mineral fertilizers. If I worked alone, it went slowly.
If I worked with another employee, we tried to set and break time records. I did this full-time for two summers. Eventually, I was promoted to sales. I stocked the shelves, swept the floors, memorized several pages’ worth of information in order to answer common questions that affected Bakersfield, learned how to test the pH balance and calcium content of soil, and worked the register. Every customer was to be an object of attention, though many people came in with the same problems.
I became used to the hard customers, the incoherent customers and the “enemies” (such as the gardening talk show host who only dealt with the name brand money-makers and not our local products). One day, an elderly man in overalls and thick glasses walked into the store, and I started reciting my lines. “How can I help you today, sir?” But I was taken off-guard by a product request louder than anything I had heard in the store before—except for the gas-powered forklift. He was deaf. I practically ran to the back of the store (after politely motioning that I would be right back, of course) to take refuge in the experienced wisdom of Paul, who had big sideburns and a handlebar mustache and had worked there for many years. Paul took him off my hands.
Apparently, Paul had dealt with this old deaf man before. I suppose that if he had been deaf for quite some time, he might have forgotten how physically offensive it is to yell (unexpectedly, especially) in someone’s face. But there’s also the possibility that he didn’t care how he heaved his language around. I didn’t think it would be wise to ask him at the time which was his philosophy.
Then there was the time when my neighbors came into the store. We established early on that we recognized we lived next-door to each other. They wanted to kill all of the weeds in their front lawn, and I knew what would do the job, so I explained it to them.Here’s some background though: these neighbors were not pleasant. The husband, probably in his late 60s, encouraged his stylized poodle (named Pierre, of all names) to use our front lawn as a restroom. My dad caught him doing it several times. So one day, we sort of didn’t stop our Husky-Chow mix from defending our yard by attacking the poodle, and the neighbors knew. Shortly after that, our dog’s insides turned squishy and her health declined. We had to have her put to sleep soon enough. We had no proof for anything, but we had plenty of suspicions.
I wasn’t surprised when the neighbors didn’t take my advice and walked out without buying anything. A few weeks later I noticed that their lawn had turned yellow. They hired gardeners to tear it out and replace it with new sod, and soon after that, the weeds came back. Did they know that my advice was sound, but rejected it because I belonged to the house of Moore? I tried to let my words be the mediator in the midst of the feud, and I talked to them the same way I did to the customers before and after them. But my favorite gardening-store-conflict was much more subtle, and it happened many times—sometimes several times a week. We sold a selective, systemic herbicide called Trimec, and it was one of the most popular sales. It would kill weeds, but not lawns—if used properly. Of course, there would be people who would use it wrongly, kill their lawns, and come back to our store to blame us for the mistake. Those customers made me laugh. If they got bad enough, I could use my authority to ask them to leave and never come back.
That’s not the best part. Time after time, customers would walk into the store and ask for Triaminic, which is a brand-name cough syrup for children. Most of the time I would inwardly laugh at them and hand them a bottle of Trimec. I tried to understand (or imagine) their logic: Oh, no: a word I haven’t seen all my life...but I’ve heard this word on TV. It must be the same thing because it looks like it could fit. I don’t know how accurate that was, but it gave me peace in my perceived superiority. I distinctly remember one red-faced woman (maybe in her late 40s) with the kind of glasses that didn’t look thick, but still magnified her eyes when I looked at them. She came in blustering. “I need some Triaminic to kill splurge.”
(Note: she meant, “I need some Trimec to kill spurge.” Spurge is a creeping green and purple weed that grows close to the ground and has networking root systems. Also note: I may be mixing memories here. This may or may not be a singular event.)
I coolly responded that children’s cough syrup would not kill spurge, but I did, in fact, have Trimec, which could. She looked up and clearly didn’t get the joke. It was a blank stare she gave, and then she blinked. “How much is it?”
My smugness was wasted. I didn’t question then why I would try to play on customers’ cursive readings of brand names, but now I know that to teach them to do otherwise would have been like trying to teach a rabbit not to hop. It seemed to be so deeply ingrained in their reading skills that only a time machine could have stopped them from misreading words they weren’t used to.
See, there is a difference between clarifying or correcting language for the purpose of communication and doing so for pride. I let the latter happen (or, more accurately, pushed the latter to happen), and I generally helped those bad pronouncers in contempt. I’m glad lessons can be learned after the incident.
But it’s not all serious. Sometimes it’s really funny. I wonder who the first Southerner was who put the “r” in “wash.”
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