Melantrys’ Page

The first I noticed of a customer today was my colleague A. trying to usher him out of the store.
He was arguing with him about something (in a friendly way), which I didn’t catch. I thought it was about the reason for my colleague sending him outside - he had brought his dog inside with him.
Black, might have been a bulldog.

My colleague later told me that the guy had replied that there was no sign at the door saying dogs weren’t allowed. There was, but as the new boss we got¹ had torn off and only partly replaced the signs the old boss had hung up, A. thought he might not have printed that one yet and believed the customer. He told him that nevertheless we were selling foodstuffs, and that no dogs were allowed in a store then, which he surely could understand.

The young man let himself be steered towards the exit, but not without stopping at the register and putting forth the same request he’d been discussing with A. earlier.
He wanted us to order Lonsdale² jackets, or at least acquire one for him from somewhere.

I really hate the Nazis for adopting regular stuff as “theirs”. When you see someone in Lonsdale clothing, you’re left guessing. Sometimes his hairstyle or behaviour will tell you all you need to know. But often you’re simply wondering “Fucking piece of nazi filth, confused person from Mars who simply bought him-/herself some expensive sports clothing or clueless tourist?”

Although the combination of Lonsdale jacket (he was wearing an elderly one), faux army pants and bulldog (or similar) on a leash was already pretty much of a giveaway, I gave him the benefit of the doubt and answered him neutrally and politely.
I told him that we can’t order stuff that’s not listed. The only thing he could do was to call our central and suggest that they try to order it.
He insisted that we surely had the means to get the order number and order a Lonsdale jacket.
I said we didn’t and that - although I very much doubted they’d be interested in an expensive clothing brand like that - the guys at central were the only ones with the means of adding to our product range.
That was the plain and simple truth, but he didn’t quite seem to buy it.

Eventually he brought his dog outside and came back in to do some shopping.
While he was paying he asked me “Oh, come on, you surely used to wear Lonsdale too in the past?”
That was just too much, so I politely informed him that - due to the scene that brand too often got associated with - I didn’t and won’t wear any Lonsdale clothing - ever. While I was saying that about the scene, he emphatically plucked at his jacket, flashing me a wide smile. He insisted that I must have, as I had a “Lonsdale face”. Here he slipped, and accidentally used the more personal and not the formal German way of addressing people, which he had been using earlier. He immediately apologized for his rudeness and corrected his way of addressing me. My inner self had finally gnawed through its gag and leash and popped up to - politely - inform him that I was having no problem with that but with allegedly having a “Lonsdale face”.
Our business was done - “Here’s your change.” - “Thank you.” - Good-bye.”

About an hour later he was back for some more booze shopping, and apparently had reflected upon my reaction and decided that I am not a closet neo-nazi but a stinking lefty.
He was still as cheerfully polite as before, but when I was done counting the coins he had handed me and looked up at him to tell him that he had given me a bit too much money he said “Ich weiß, ich nix schwarz” before I could even open my mouth and sashayed out of the store.
Brilliant wordplay, considering.
“Ich weiß” alone would in this case (and did to some extent of course) mean “I know.”
The added part though turned it into a sentence in broken German, saying “I white, I no black.”

I have never seen this young man; I hope he was merely passing through or something, and didn’t just move here or so…

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1. Yeah, even more exciting news… [back]
2. If you haven’t read the Lonsdale link I provided, do that right now, then continue with the text. [back]

Today it happened again.
A customer asked if we had cow mulch.

I say the time has come to stop this barbaric shredding of cows!
What sane person can pour bits and pieces of cows onto his or her flowerbed and feel nothing wrong with it?! (Not to mention the blood seeping into the ground water….)

Run, cows, ruuuuuun!!!!!

Or…

… maybe they meant bark mulch?

Let me give you a quick German lesson:

Mulch - - - mulch

Rind - - - cow
Rinder - - - cows
Rindermulch - cow mulch

Rinde - - - bark
Rinden - - - barks
Rindenmulch - bark mulch

Dear customers, the only cow product you can buy for your garden is cow crap dung (Rinderdung).
Ah, you think Rindermulch is bark mulch? Sorry, no. Please go back to school and learn the basics of your mother tongue. While you’re there maybe someone’ll teach you the difference between going to and after people as well…

*sighs mournfully*

While I was away from the till, tidying up some shelves, my colleague A. kindly took care of some of the customers so I didn’t have to run to and fro.

An older man merrily announced “Ooh, it’s the boss himself at the till!” then asked him where he was from. A. avoided a direct answer by claiming that he had forgotten, hahaha.
“Well, which language do you speak?” He should have said “German,” but my colleague somewhat truthfully replied “Kurdish.”
The man then launched into a diatribe against all those foreigners who just come into our country to do nothing and get paid for it by the state. (As opposed to my good, busy, dutiful colleague.) “Isn’t that so?” “Yes, yes, you sure have a point there,” my poor colleague agreed.
“In Thailand people asked me where I was from, and when I said “Germany,” they always said “Ah, the country where you get paid for doing nothing.” It’s all the fault of Die Grünen¹.”

Finally - after repeating himself a few times - he took his purchases and left. I drifted over to my colleague and asked him how anyone could be so far removed from reality to talk that way to a foreigner and expect him to actually agree. A. said he really couldn’t say, “… and what was that man doing in Thailand anyway?”

Good question. A very good question indeed. Why do most German men go to Thailand?

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1. lit. “the greens”, ecologically (and socially) oriented political party that only recently had any political influence, and certainly none concerning welfare for unemployed immigrants [back]

A regular customer insisted today that she had paid less for some plants yesterday. I told her that could not possibly be, as we only had one batch of them and they all had the same price.
As she would not believe me I wanted to call my colleague A. to verify what I was saying. Then I remembered he was still on his lunch break and said so.

“Oh no, I just saw him.”
I looked at the watch and realized that might be true if my colleague was being overly punctual, although I usually note his return. So I asked my colleague S. to go and get him from the “garden” (as we call the outside space with the plants and garden mould) where the lady said she had spotted him. S. came back and said he was not outside; only two customers.

*brain between shutdown and overload* “Um, I just had two Turkish customers who went back outside to get some cypress trees. Maybe you mistook one of them for my colleague…?”
While I was saying that A. was approaching from the other side, which S. commented upon, which in turn kind of drowned out what exactly I had been saying there.
“See, I told you so. It’s not as if I tend to imagine things.” (like the prices of plants… )

After she had left with her plants (paying the price I had told her they were…), A. had disappeared to somewhere, so I asked S. if she had asked him whether or not he had been outside.
“Of course I did. He wasn’t.”

This woman has been coming to the store for years. And she mistakes some stranger for A.? (I don’t recall having seen those two customers before.)

Oh, right, sorry, I forgot. One beer-bellied Turk in an ugly cardigan looks like the next slim Turk in another ugly cardigan…

I may be a little late in telling/posting but before and during my trip I just felt too preoccupied to sit down and write anything.

Everyone’s been asking the same questions, so here goes:

The story of me conceiving of the idea of going to Amman.

As I was having some spare money (well, not actually spare money as such *cough, cough* but accessible money ) I had decided to treat myself to a real holiday this year, possibly in Turkey or somewhere. Sometime after my colleague A.’s and the boss’ vacation. Whenever.

Then I heard that aNarki-13 was not just staying in Amman for a short while but for weeks.
And Attawie was there as well.
About 20 unanswered yahoo offline messages, 10 SMSs - unanswered - and one threat to phone him (just to be silent at him) later the Kid confirmed that he’d be staying until around the end of August as well.

A quick calculation showed that even with the boss going on a three-week vacation it should be possible for me to go to Amman and still see all of these people.
Of course, with bosses things are never quite as straightforward as they seem to regular people, but after a couple of - long - days spent anxiously waiting for his final verdict things worked out the way I wanted them to. (You feel like a rather sorry sod phoning the Jordanian embassy asking about how long it will take them to put a visa into the passport that you have applied for three weeks ago and which should be arriving soonish while not even knowing whether the holiday is going to take place or not….)

Well, it was going to take place, and right after I got the ok from the boss I went to the nearest travel agency to book my flights.
Took the lady there some heavy wrestling but then she managed to include my meal request in the booking and to arrange for an earlier flight than the computer originally wanted to book for the first leg of the journey. The original booking would have left me with only one hour to change planes at Schiphol (Amsterdam) airport - with only one KLM flight from Amsterdam to Amman per night! Better having four hours to waste than the possibility of missing the flight and arriving in Amman a full day later.
She also - as per my request - tried to book me onto a later second flight for the return trip, but either the computer didn’t accept it or she made some mistake. She figured it might be because that would leave me with a stay of six hours at Schiphol airport. But she assured me that I’d have no trouble changing planes in the 50 minutes that the booking left me with. Well, what the heck, I thought, if I miss that plane, there’ll be several going back from Amsterdam to Germany on that day.

Even earlier I had ordered a load of traveller cheques and finally gotten myself a credit card, so nothing could go wrong anymore.

Unfortunately Caesar of Pentra went on vacation in Syria a tad earlier and could not make it to Amman, nor could the Average Iraqi (note: blog still “dead”, author happily not ) leave Iraq (Get a passport, you bozo!) but more and more people seemed to be flocking there, such as Morbid Smile, Treasure of Baghdad and 24 Steps to Liberty.

When I first started planning my trip to Jordan, my Turkish/Kurdish/Martian colleague A. was already away on his holiday. As he is constantly poking fun at me - or rather implying improper behaviour on my part - whenever he hears of me going to festivals or parties and sharing tents or bedrooms, another colleague and me were wondering what his reaction might be when he returned and heard of my plans. I laughed and said “I should tell him I’m going there to marry aNarki.” S.: “Do that!”

So the plan was born. On his first day back at work we kept dropping hints that he unfortunately failed to pick up on. What with him usually being “nosy as a goat” as we Germans say our only explanation for this was that he was still dreaming of his holiday.

Hints included
- me showing a picture of aNarki to a colleague, K., and practically bouncing up and down with joy while announcing that that was HIM by the way and her answering that he looked like a very nice person,
- K. inquiring whether I’d have to be veiled for the wedding.

Finally, a few minutes before my lunch break, I simply showed him the pic, asking his opinion. First he got sidetracked by the other people shown in the photo, then he too announced aNarki to be looking like a friendly person. When I told him that I was going to marry him A. totally disappointed us by merely saying “Congratulations!”

After both him and me had returned from our respective lunch breaks he asked another colleague, Ma., if that marriage story was really true. She said it was, so A. simply accepted it. Blast! S. and me had expected him to be sceptical and - once finally convinced the story was true - to try and talk me out of marrying a person I had never met before. Behind my back he apparently expressed some reservations but not to me, oh no. Actually, he was being so nice and helpful (giving tips for immigration and whatnot) that the joke wasn’t funny at all and I soon felt so bad about it that I prematurely cancelled it before S. was due to work that week.

But the joke stirred up something else.
Ma. started getting the idea that what with me meeting several young men over there I might end up marrying someone else. I don’t know what possessed her to get this into her head - she knew right from the start that the thing regarding aNarki and me was a joke to pay A. back for all his past comments on me and my male friends and nothing else - but she kept discussing it.

Kept discussing it first mainly as a joke as well but then with mounting concern, probably due to my replies. But how can you reply to someone who’s convinced that marrying an Arab - any Arab - automatically results in you ending up wearing hijab (or worse)? So I answered stuff like “Look here, if I were to marry any of the Iraqis I know and started wearing hijab they’d declare me insane cos none of them would want me to.” Somehow for her this seemed to imply that I might seriously be considering marriage.

She also told me to not get too involved with the locals when saying goodbye and wishing me a nice holiday. I didn’t even ask whether she meant actual Jordanians or the bloggers I was going to meet, as I felt it didn’t really matter anyway.
Camel drivers, the lot of them!

A neighbour only half-jokingly asked what I’d do if I got kidnapped into a harem, while his wife was more concerned with Jordan’s vicinity to Israel and Lebanon.

So, dear readers, I spent my entire holiday sitting in my hotel apartment and ordering pizza which I had them deposit in front of my door.
The weather was a steady 25°, thanks to the AC in the bedroom; the scenery got a bit boring though after two weeks of staring out into the same street.

… Condoms with Santa on? On second thought… scrap that, somebody is very likely already selling ‘em…

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

This is not only what it looks like, i.e. toilet paper, it also whiffs of spicy Christmas cookies.
We’ve been selling it from shortly before Christmas on, and I just felt like sharing it with you.
As it’s also cheaper than the other brands of paper we have, a couple of colleagues have bought it already. (Plus, we’re using it on our toilet at the store which is where I got my sample from… Unused, I might add.)
One colleague has a young son who still needs assistance on the toilet, um, afterwards. She told me she was wondering what took him so long, and when she went in to check he had rolled most of the toilet paper off the roll “to see if there was anything else but reindeers and stars printed on”. Ain’t children sweet?! At least he didn’t eat it. The smell is really convincing.

“If dysfunction(…), if dysfunction is a function, then I must be some kind of genius” (Pitchshifter - Genius) Man, I love this song. *sings along* *skips back to beginning*

Arrr, I’m fairly sure I wanted to say something else, but my brain seems to be on hold again. I’ll just do a second post should I recall what it was.

So only a few more days left of this year.

The fireworks sale starts tomorrow. Hooray. Not. Tomorrow we’ll have to start at 8:00. And our storage room from which we sell ‘em is so cooooooooooooold!!!
Oh well. I hope I will survive the two days to come. Stress, stress, stress, aaaaaaah!!

But then! Hahah! I’ll join the end of the annual LAM in Holland. Don’t fret, dear fans, even should I decide to not take my computer with me after all, I’m sure I will be able to use the host’s laptop.

Good night.

….. for I have nothing much to say at the moment.

A. is in hospital with kidney stones, work is stressing me out, and on top of it I seem to have developed a weird allergy - apparently to work.
If there I break out in itchy welts and rashes, at home they disappear and I’m fine. Hm. And considering how the boss’s wife getting angry at me for taking off sick the afternoon (doctor’s orders….) stressed me out as well I suppose I’d rather vote for something at work being the cause (buggered if I know what though) than work itself, as much as I hate it these days.
(If you’re new to this here blog just read up on posts like “Damn them filthy thieving Arabs”, and you’ll get why I don’t like my boss’s… huh… policy much…)

… to - hopefully - keep my faithful readers entertained.

Admittedly it’s not really new, but most of you won’t know it.

There’s this black lady who is a regular customer at the store. (No, this is not another boss story! )
She always does these weird things with her hair, like piling that incredible mass up or tying it up in a scarf of the American flag.

Anyway, she always smiled at me when seeing me at the store or elsewhere. Really friendly lady.
Only, since… er… two years ago she’s smiling even wider. Well, ok, not as much as the first few times, but I feel it’s still a bit more than it used to be.

The reason? I don’t know!

I was just returning from an annual festivity 30km from here. As I couldn’t have the car, I was going back by bus. And when I got on, there she was, riding home as well, giving me the widest smile ever and greeting me.

I am sure her reaction was totally unrelated to the fact that I happened to be wearing a mildly medievalish blouse, leather pants and no shoes and was carrying a sword and dagger….

(*listening to “In taberna” by Corvus Corax*)

Apparently some misguided small child has lost his little fluffy Teletubby dolly in the store yesterday. When we started work this morning it was lying on a table near the register.

My colleague K., who was doing the till this morning, took some other stuff from the table to put it away and accidentally knocked the doll off.

Now, dear readers, please guess what I said to her!

“Ooooooah, Teletubby aua!”

If that looks like “Awwww, Teletubby ouch!” to you…. you are right. Isn’t this sad? But then again, the only appropriate way to comment on a “hurt” Teletubby, innit?

(From medieval music to noise: Disturbed - The game)