A COUPLE of weeks ago we had a bit of fun in this column with some of the things people have told us at work. So I thought we should pass on a few other intriguing exchanges people sent in that may give you a chuckle.
Incidentally if you have any more tales to add to the collection, don’t hesitate to send them down the email line to geoff.goodfellow@bigpond.com. We’d love to share them.
“MY grandmother used to go to the saloon to have her hair done. And she liked to pack away her unwanted junk in cartoons,” wrote one reader who also recalled some gems from her former job.
They were uttered by the woman who took down the classified advertisements over the phone. “This woman grew up speaking Italian as her first language and tended to spell things the way they sounded, leaving someone else to work it out later,” she recalls.
“You could usually tell when she was at her best after you heard the production staff shouting, ‘What the hell is this supposed to be?’ writes the correspondent, who backed the story up with some classic examples like when the Italian receptionist transcribed an invitation to a wine tasting, where the wine would be served with Cannon Bears.
“They were going to eat cheese - you know that soft stuff.” she explained to the confused production staff. “Camembert?” suggested the production staff member. “Yes, that’s the one.”
According to the same lady, a local beauty salon was offering specials on “manure cures.”
THAT newspaper once ran a pre-wedding notice announcing the happy couple would not be married in a garden ceremony as the call intended, but “married in a garden cemetery.”
On another occasion they had an In Memoriam notice for someone’s dear dad that read; “You will always be my dead dad.”
Then there was the day they mixed up the headers on the “For Sale” and “In Memoriam” columns.
Strangely they didn’t get complaints from the “In Memoriam” advertisers, whose dearly beloveds turned up in the “For Sale” column, “but the owners of the six milking goats who were in the memoriam column weren't very happy,” she reckons.
THERE was a Mittagong bloke who sometimes wrestled with finding the right word to explain what he was trying to say. For example he talked about a cowboy pulling a gun out of his upholstery, and drinking beer from his computer mug.
When the wife of one of the lads was overdue with the birth of her first child, he told the blokes with great conviction, “the doctor said if the baby isn’t born today, he’s gunna seduce her.”
A LOVELY bloke who works in the nursery section at a local hardware store tells me that a couple of weeks ago he had just finished a lengthy discussion with a customer about the merits of composting.
“The moment I finished with him,” he writes, “I turned around and stood face to face with the next customer who asked me straight out, Lloyd, do you have worms?”
WHICH reminds me about an elderly couple who visited council’s customer service counter a couple of years ago, discussing the merits of the various compost bins Council sold.
The dear old lady listened intently while the old bloke just smiled and nodded periodically as the council staff member patiently showed her examples of the bins. But she wasn’t impressed, complaining that they didn’t have bottoms in them.
We explained that this was pretty useful because it gave the worms a fighting chance of getting to the scraps.
“Worms,” she shrieked. “I don’t want worms. Have you got any that don’t have worms?”
“No,” we explained, “but you can buy those revolving drum things at the hardware shops. They don’t have worms.”
“I already have one of those.”
“Fine, madam, which one of our three would you like then?”
“The big one I think.”
Her poor husband cringed. Looking at the size of his frail body and the size of our biggest bin we weren’t surprised.
“I’m not sure the big one fits in a car, Madam,” said the quick thinking customer service staff member, not wanting to be responsible for the old bloke dropping dead.
“What! I don’t want it for the car, you fool,” she snapped, “It’s for the garden.”
And that, dear reader, is a true story.
*Geoff Goodfellow has lived his life in the Southern Highlands, works for Wingecarribee Council and is well known in local sporting and social circles.
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