You follow her down to a bridge by a fountain. "Blimix has told me some of the shorter stories from his personal experience," Lucy explains. "If you have the time, I'll be happy to share them. Maybe it will save him some time later. Maybe you'll be amused. Maybe not." She pauses to ponder that. "If not, I don't know what you're doing here in the first place," she says severely. "Let's see, what can I tell you..." She suddenly brightens as she remembers, then goes into a slight trance as she recounts the tales, apparently verbatim, for you.
The Jester was driving Brian and Blimix to one of Goldenflame's games. Prevented by another driver from entering the right lane, they found themselves coming upon the much tighter ramp to the left, far too fast. The Jester miraculously managed to avoid slamming into the divider, instead jerking left and going into a spin. The front-left corner of the car hit the concrete barrier on the inside of the curve, while the car was sliding at fifty-five miles per hour. Upon impact, a window shattered outward, Blimix's glasses launched themselves across the car, and the Jester called, "Pediddle!"1 (They escaped uninjured.)
The goings-on during ARML (American Regional Math League) trips are consistently noteworthy, for those people fortunate enough to be on a cool team. ("Weekend-long party" is an apt description. We had purity tests, singalongs, games of Mao, Hearts, and Ultimate, races to lectures, and long philosophical discussions.) We would toss Frisbees and the Woosh2 around in fields, in parking lots, and on the bus. The driver has a barrier behind his seat to protect him from projectiles. That is, it would protect him from direct projectiles. The Woosh bounces, as Gbob demonstrated by throwing it from the back of the bus, past the flailing hands of thirty math students, against the wall next to the barrier, and directly into the driver's head.
Nor was that the only amusement.
At the rest stop, the students were each given fifteen dollars for food. Blimix and Gbob, having returned as coaches, were allotted ten dollars each. This money was handed out by Mr. Boddie, who, low on small bills, handed Gbob a bill and told him, "Here's a twenty. You each get half." Gbob unhesitatingly tore it in half and handed one piece to Blimix. The look upon Mr. Boddie's face was priceless. (This probably goes for Blimix too, but that was unwitnessed.)
There are some episodes that don't fit into the Smart-ass Cashier series. For example:
Blimix was at his cash register, with the front of the store completely empty, when, with a *click* *swoosh* *bang* the drawer of the register six feet to his left popped open. Those drawers cannot just fall open; on occasion, they even fail to open when they should. In a state of extreme confusion and curiosity, Blimix approached the register and found a housefly wandering around on the touch-screen. The receipt showed that it had managed to ring up a slice of pan cheese pizza, then wander to the other end of the screen to total the sale, then crawl near the top of the screen and hit the fifty dollar button.
There were immediate jokes about how to fill in the "reason for refund," and continuing jokes about training the flies and getting them on the payroll.
Nor was that the only amusement.
[These rest of the episodes from here have been moved to the "Quirky Customers" section of the "Smart-ass Cashier" page, as of 3/5/00.]
Blimix had a couple of free passes to any movie at the theater, so he invited his friend Diazla to accompany him to a movie as soon as he got out of work. Upon arriving and checking the showtimes, they found that the films that they would really have liked to see were playing at inconvenient times. Preferring not to wait nearly two hours, they settled for viewing "Doug's First Movie". He obtained the tickets, and they seated themselves in an otherwise empty theater.
Shortly before the movie was to start, one of the theater managers walked in, approached them, and said, "You guys didn't really want to watch this movie, did you?" She sort of did, he didn't really. They waffled. The manager continued, "Because we were hoping to do a run-down of 'Never Been Kissed' here." Great! They both would enjoy watching that. "Do you want to do the run-down?" They happily agreed to. "By the way, I don't remember you. My name's Chris." Blimix and Diazla introduced themselves.
Chris started to walk away, and Diazla joked, "Do we get our money back?"
He turned, startled. "Don't tell me you actually paid for this?"
"No," they reassured him. He smiled and left. After a short pause for reflection, they commented to each other on the oddity of that event, good fortune though it was. The introductions seemed awfully familiar, though there was some amount of interaction between the theater crew and that of the restaurant at which Blimix worked, which could explain it. He was, after all, still dressed for work.
But then the very odd thought struck: The manager had assumed that Blimix knew what a run-down was! Thanks to having friends in theaters, he did in fact know that run-downs occur when theaters get new reels; they play them the night before they get shown, with some employees watching, to make sure that there are no defects. But how did the manager know that he knew? And why in the world would some customer be invited to do it? This is, of course, when the hilarity of the situation hit him.
The only two passes given to that showing had been free. In the computers, that would be indistinguishable from an employee bringing a relative to the film. Blimix was wearing black pants and a white button-down shirt, exactly the apparel worn by employees of that theater. The manager had seen him in uniform, with his feet up on the rail of the balcony, prepared to watch a free movie, and assumed that this must be an employee whom he simply didn't recognize.
Blimix and Diazla laughed over it, enjoyed the movie, and dutifully noted the lack of defects in the film.
Honors Chemistry teachers may not know what goes on behind their backs.
Of course there is the usual stuff. People torch random items on their Bunsen burners. People remove caustic substances from the cabinets to see if they will eat a hole through their desk/floor/textbook.
Blimix's class specialized in water fights. Each desk was equipped with a sink. You know the type: tapered nozzle, high pressure. One person would be seated, studying some arcane formula, and another would walk by the desk, quickly twisting the cold water handle to full geyser. The force of the water would cause it to bounce off the bottom of, and then out of, the sink, spraying anyone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity. Ranged attacks were carried out with the use of eye droppers, which could squirt a small amount of water from one desk to the next. It was Blimix's discovery that, because the rubber and glass parts of the droppers were not securely fixed to each other, one could push the rubber bulb quickly down the tube, resulting in a much stronger burst of water than was yielded by squeezing the bulb. At first confused and beaten back by his superior firepower, his opponents eventually caught on. Near the end of the year, the war escalated to the point at which he felt justified in calling in the tactical nukes. As the one person in particular who seemed set out to make life difficult for him stood far off in the diagonally opposite corner of the room, he quietly affixed a rubber hose (which normally brings gas to a Bunsen burner) to his sink's nozzle. Blimix took careful aim, then let him have it.
From that day forth, he was no longer a target.
Blimix's copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid has been bulldozed. It had been borrowed by a friend, and left in a hastily abandoned house that was razed shortly thereafter.
During a Denny's run, a man who had been walking from table to table finally approached Blimix's group, and offered them some business cards. Blimix knew that Denny's is not a place for solicitation, but is a place for eating. So he took one card, smiled and thanked the man, then chewed it up without reading it. The man's face took on an odd expression (as did those of several of Blimix's companions), and he left. Blimix shortly removed from his mouth and read the card, which said, "Hi, I'm a deaf person and I'm selling these sign language alphabet cards for ten cents each, and your support will help something or other." (Oops.) He found the guy and gave him a dime.
When Blimix's high school became a Nationally Recognized Blue Ribbon School of Excellence, the administration, congratulating themselves for their unearned achievement, printed new stationery for the entire school, proclaiming: "A Nationally Recognized School of Excelence". The spelling error was propagated several thousand times. This is what happens when an incompetent faculty takes credit for students who are several times more intelligent than they are.
1. In case you do not know the game, one calls
"Pediddle" upon sighting a car with one headlight out.
2. "Woosh" is a registered trademark of OddzOn
Products. "Frisbee" is a registered trademark of Wham-o Inc.
