Customer said newly purchased running shoes, while heavier, had more support. Customer said Vietnamese diacritical marks indicated raising or lowering of pitch, while another mark signaled an abruptness to the word’s pronunciation — phhhht! (System devised by French monks.)
Customer said it was good to have gotten his exercise out of the way early. Customer said that, exercising in the heat, you limit the benefit of your cardiovascular work out. (Body expends so much energy cooling down.) Customer ordered small cap with whole milk on way to get hair done. Precise rectilineal angles characterized the thighs and crotches of the two seated men. Customer “must have been teacher”: had left behind multiple corrected tests. Customer observed that he was drinking water from a Styrofoam cup and drinking coffee from a treated paper cup, which were at odds with his expressed environmental views. Customer said political canvassing was definitely outside her comfort zone yet was glad they’d managed to flip the seat.
Dust pile on the tile floor became “more and more obnoxious” to attendant (“Pilus interruptus” diagnosed wherein the attendant has swept refuse into a pile but has been prevented from sweeping it up. There it lies in the center of the floor, among so many steps, this way and that, of unrealizing customers.)
(Attendant the worried shopkeeper of the movie, not the hero of the movie, and so must have his eyes out for the hero. Of these people he encountered, who was the hero?)
Back Windows — these were museum display cases — the telephone box or transformer among the trees and the wires that came out of it, suffused with embalming daylight.
Customer’s focus interrupted by removal, swift and unannounced, of the napkin that lay by his mouse pad.
Being Haunted by The Unlikely
Curiosity: why did attendant feel his thought that the customer, who’d left behind him multiple corrected tests must have been a teacher, was a stupid thought? Response to query: because he supposed the smart person would say, he was obviously a teacher. To the attendant, not as daft as he could seem but testing around the middle of the pack, the improbable always had a 50 percent chance of occurring. It loomed large before him that you could imagine some reason a non-teacher would leave behind corrected school tests.
Attendant now quite in interested in this, which could be even a larger problem for customers, this problem of being haunted by the unlikely . . . Why would a customer not think that, for example, a surgery’s ninety-five percent success rate would be worth trying to ease his crippling pain? Because he thinks there is a ninety percent chance that he’ll be among the five percent, for whom it doesn’t work, and a pretty good chance he’ll be among the one percent who die. (And if you dig into who the five percent are, certain customers might not be wrong about that.) Conversely the same customer might think nothing of dropping fifty dollars on a dietary supplement, which has no chance of working, on the outside chance that it just might, that it “at least can’t hurt.”
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 