This Is This

I find it fun to think that I have supernatural powers. Like when you walk under a streetlight as it turns off and pretending it’s something to do with you. Or when a dog calmly pays attention to ony you and everything you do in a room full of people and you imagine it knows what you are thinking.

Yesterday was an example of this.

I went out to buy a craft shop to buy an A1 piece of black card. First of all, I started off looking stupid by saying to the woman at the till: “Is this A1?”

Because I don’t know right? How the fuck should I know? Anyway, she nodded at me like I’m an idiot and then I realised I should have asked my second question first.

“Is it black?”

I should point out to those who don’t know that I am colourblind. Not totally, but I can’t pick out subtleties in colour. Or anything, sometimes.

She looked at me like my next question would have been be to point at my feet and say, “Earth. Right?”

“It’s black, yes,” she said, almost incredulous at my lack of awareness of colour and the ISO 216 standard paper size system.

“Great thanks.”

She rings it up

“£3.50.”

I hand over my card.

“Sorry,” she said. Actually, no, she didn’t say sorry - fuck her, “there’s a five pound minimum on cards.”

“Really?” I looked mildly annoyed. I didn’t have time to pick out things I wanted to make up the extra £1.50, so I said, “Right, I’ll just take another one of these.”

I walked over to the poster section and got another one. Why I was in a hurry to buy a sheet of A1 black card isn’t important at this point, but it was then.

She rang them through and then looked dumbfounded. She paused, looked at the receipt and the screen and called her colleague over. She mumbled something about a card refund to him and he said to put them through again.

“Um,” she stated, “I’ve only charged you for one by mistake. I need to charge you for the other one, so I need to do a refund on you card and then charge you for both.”

“That’s OK,” I said, “I only wanted one.”

The colleague looked at her and says, “That’s a lot easier. We’ll just do that.”

She nods.

Woo hoo! And I win.

Her mistake was doing the thing that she said she couldn’t do, which she could, she just didn’t want to. The thing that I wanted in the first place.

I tapped the card I didn’t want and say, “Can you put this back?”

“Um, OK,” she said.

Supernatural mind trick or just a heady mixture of incompetance and luck?

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 18th, 2006 at 8:43 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or you can skip to the end and leave a comment yourself.