The Mill
May 26, 2012;
When you think you have nothing to say to the
blank page, often the best approach is to just start
typing. Sometimes, though, the smartest thing to do
is leave the page blank and avoid boring people.
Was it Oscar Wilde who reserved his severest
contempt for boring people? I think so, and I also
think I know why. It's not something you can
describe intellectually, but viscerally, you need no
explanation regarding how painful it is to be trapped
by a bore.
It is that reason that I have never taken a cruise.
There are places I would like to see that are most
conveniently accomplished by a cruise, such as
the Alaskan coast, but the thought of having a bore
latch on to me, and me having nowhere to go but
overboard, has kept me from those and other sights.
And, of course, you feel guilty for hating the poor
bore because most often, they are good people who
simply think everyone else is as interested in their
quotidian activities as they are.
Sherlock's Haven had a small corps of that kind of
bore, and as soon as I saw one of them walk into the
store, I'd hustle to the back and shamelessly leave
their servicing to one of the employees. Objectively
speaking, that's the kind of management activity that
unions should prohibit.
The one customer I most disliked would come in
and start talking at you without any lead-in, at all,
and he was an expert at everything. On one
occasion, I forgot myself and when he walked in I
asked, "how are you." What a mistake...about 30
seconds on, I caught myself and told him that "how
are you" is a greeting, not a question. He always
acted hurt when I stopped him in that and similar
ways, but not hurt so badly that he ever took the
heavy hint and shut up.
Another man came in for the first (and only) time
and started monopolizing the conversation of the
regulars. You know, the daily give and take that
manages to solve all of the nation's, and the world's,
problems in the time it takes to smoke a pipe or cigar
and then go back to work. I considered it one of my
obligations to protect my regulars from such
intrusions, so I told this guy, "so long, and have a
good day." This guy looked at me and said, "I didn't
say I was leaving." "I know," I replied, "but I did."
He got upset because he didn't do anything he
recognized as blatantly wrong and asked me why I
was kicking him out. I hadn't thought it through , but
managed to come up with the exact right answer
from my perspective: "because you're a lousy
conversationalist." He had a terribly hurt look on his
face (I suppose he thought he was a brilliant
raconteur) when he left, never, blessedly, to return.
Don't think I'm all that bad a guy. In the almost 20
yrs. that Sherlock's had its doors open to the public,
I doubt I threw more than 5 people out of the store
for having a bad personality. Of course, I can't know
how many were not thrown out but just decided not
to come back after they took umbrage at some
imagined insult.
One customer took that imagined insult (well, it
wasn't really imagined) and flung it back in my face.
The subject was our annual Christmas dinner, to
which my favorite customers...more like friends,
were invited, plus my employees and their wives. I
always managed to find a place that served good
food and also allowed us to smoke our cigars and if I
were an outsider, I'd think that such an invitation
was the best ticket in town especially with San
Francisco being such a square town, and all. (Not
square, like Waterloo, Iowa, but square in the sense
of it being so self-reverential and politically correct.)
(I need to say, I have never been to Waterloo, Iowa,
am not even sure that Waterloo is in Iowa, or
anywhere else outside of Belgium, but the name
popped into my head at this moment and I typed it in.
My sincere and honest apology to any and all from
Waterloo, IA. I bet it's a sweet place to live and I am
not being ironic...maybe.)
Anyhow, one day before Christmas a customer
who was a bit weird on his best day, and not
scintillating company, if not quite boring, said he
heard about our Christmas dinner and he was
hoping to get invited. Can you imagine that? I told
him that he was not on the invitation list and his
response then was to ask if a customer had to
spend a certain amount of money to qualify.
Touché.That got me pretty angry...especially
because I never based the way I treated, or felt
about, people on the amount of money, if any, they
spent in the store. My prevailing philosophy, from
before day one, was that if a person were a lady or
gentleman, they would be welcome to my "living
room" as it were, regardless of how much they
spend, and if the were not a lady
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or gentleman, no amount of money in hand would
afford them a place on the floor. This impertinent
fellow was never going to get a Christmas dinner
with the Sherlock's crowd. In deference to the
sensitivities of the regulars who were standing
around to hear this conversation, I never did tell the
fellow that not only was no expenditure required, but
that half the people invited were members of The
Cheap Bastards of America club.
But back to the subject of bores. There is no rule
of thumb I know of to identify a bore in advance, and
each person has to be taken one-at-a-time.
Stereotyping just doesn't work when it comes to
picking acquaintances or friends. I will say, though,
that as despised as they are in many quarters
(except when their expertise is necessary) lawyers
are rarely bores. They know how to talk and make
their point in an efficient manner. Doctors, while not
always the most interesting of people, are more on
the cusp, as a rule, and are good to have around in
case you're choking on a chicken bone. They're
tolerable conversationalists, often enough, although
their general knowledge is limited and their grasp of
human nature way down in the cellar.
The killers, however, seem to be engineers. God,
they can talk at you for hours, making you wonder
how their wives can possibly take it for a half-day, let
alone a lifetime. Fortunately, engineers are so in
love with what they do, and are so straight-arrow
(I haven't seen a lot of engineers with tattoos and
rings in their noses, have you?) that they don't seem
to want to transgress enough to become smokers of
anything (I'll be they have one of the lowest
percentage of marijuana uses profession-wise) so
maybe I won't offend too many and, as in days past,
lose important business because of my obtuseness.
And there, I had absolutely no idea where this was
going when I typed that first sentence; now i've
managed to fill in a lot of blank, white space.
Marty
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