mbtn01 said…
Great work — I know that feeling too. Though I think Murray here is expressing fear that he might one day become a member of the 1979 Mets.

10:54 AM

Michael said…
“Sometimes people stuck their head in the door just to smugly tell us that we were selling something for considerably more than one or the other of the big warehouses.”

One of my personal pet peeves. Older people tend to do this a lot-they’re trying to cadge a deal, as if you’re going to leap at them as they leave, “No! Wait! We can match that price!”

They haven’t progressed beyond the era when the owner worked all the hours the shop was open. They can’t get the mind around the fact that the only reason you’re standing there is that you’re being paid to, and you really could not care less whether they shop there or not.

You’re smart enough to know that, theoretically, you care-if no one ever shops there again, eventually the paychecks will stop. But that’s a distant, theoretical worry, whereas the customer themselves is an immediate pain in the ass right now. So no, it really doesn’t matter if the price is too high, or too low, or priced in Altairian dollars, or written in Cyrillic.

10:11 AM

Josh Wilker said…
mbtn01: You might be right. Maybe our two takes on Dale Murray’s expression are not mutually exclusive. (Great site, by the way.)

Michael: Nicely put. I’ve often felt that way during my unstargellesque low-wage-earning travels. It was a little different at the liquor store, where I came to identify with the place, and with the owner, Morty, who most of us aimless guys became quite loyal to. The store was his island, but each of us clerks had made it into our own personal island refuge too. We didn’t like being reminded that it was slowly but surely sinking into the sea.

10:42 AM

pete said…
If I can offer any sympathy,
by the time Dale and his hanging curve showed up at Shea to bask in the emptiness of a couple of 90-something loss campaigns, it was PAST starting to seem over in Flushing.

Similarly, by the time I took my station as a clerk during the final campaigns of the soon-to-become-an-office-furniture-showroom that was the hallowed ol’ liquor store, things were continuing downhill apiece.

We filled up the empty spaces not covered with cartons with the previous year’s Beaujolais Nouveau.
The window displays became less intricate and more minimal. The deliveries of new stock became rarer. The NYU co-eds got uglier.

Shady-seeming backroom meetings with “investors” grew more commonplace. We got robbed. The feeling that the end was near was never explicitly confirmed nor denied by Morty, but we limped on with a forboeding day-to-day expectation that the other shoe was about to drop at any second.

Looking back, however, I remember the good times.

And I can recall getting “tipped” with a bong-hit of particularly dry and distasteful “shake” weed.

Just that once, though.

2:21 PM