This afternoon, as I listened to an Intuit website customer serenade me over the phone with what I suspected was a slightly obscene country western 
song that he claimed to have written for both Kenny Chesney and Hank Williams Junior, I had a mini-flash back.
I got my first summer job when I was fifteen years old, working in the shoe department at K-Mart. All day long, I unpacked and arranged cheap shoes from China in rows and rows of display racks. Occasionally, I’d hunker down in the darkness of the world’s narrowest stockroom doing ten-key data entry, punching in numbers from the tickets the cashiers pulled from each pair of shoes that were sold. And once or twice a day, I’d wheel out the little blue light cart, dial into the store intercom and announce, in my best grown up voice, “Attention K-Mart Shoppers… If you look up and around you’ll see that blue light is flashing back in our footwear department, where, for the the next ten minutes, and ten minutes only, we’ll be taking an additional 30% off of our already marked down clearance shoes. So head on back to our footwear department, and, as always, thanks for shopping at K-Mart.” (Yep. I remember the script. Word for word.)
I don’t, however, remember many of the people I worked with, except for Joel. Joel was a slightly older teenager, a taller skinny guy who was a rock and roll stoner version of Napoleon Dynamite. Joel and I didn’t interact directly very often, but he would occasionally hijack the store intercom system and call out mysterious nonsensical messages to me. Evvvvvvvelyn. Have you ever walked down a road in the middle of the night with a noodle on your head…?
One afternoon, I heard a page for “Footwear, Line 2.” When I picked up the phone, I thought at first that it was Joel, faking a weird southern accent. “I’m looking for some muff,” the voice said, in a long, slow drawl.
“I see,” I responded, trying to be helpful. “Was there a particular size or color you were looking for?” I had no idea what he was talking about. For a good five minutes or so, after I realized it wasn’t Joel after all, I faked it, all the while trying to figure if maybe he was looking for a new pair of fuzzy slippers.
It turns out that naughty prank phone calls aren’t nearly as exciting for the caller if the callee is so dense that she doesn’t ever get that she’s being pranked. Eventually the caller gave up on subtlety and said something like, “Pubic hair! I’m talking about pubic hair,” at which point I hung up.
That may have been the only other prank call I’ve received since the one I think I may have gotten this afternoon. Because I’ve been Googling the song title my country western crooner mentioned, and it turns out that Kenny Chesney has never recorded a song called “Big Pussy of Kentucky.” Nope.
image from: http://lemurianabbey.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/rider-waite-the-fool.jpg
eleven bee 
