Brought To You By the Letter G and the Number 6

Letter G

First, poking fun at the people who make my paycheck possible...customers. Sometimes the customer is right. Sometimes, well, they're a little nuts. Let's see if I can tell this story without giving away too many details. Town pocket, this story is for you. A real life example of capital cursive G's.

A man comes in. He's flaming and irate. It made me want to laugh when all he'd said was "I have a few questions" in a huffy voice. (I believe he also pulled out a notepad...did he have cues for himself?) I can answer questions. "Okay," I say, humoring his huffiness. Who knows, maybe he has good reason. Fast-forward through revealing details and his issues, which are minor, really. He wants us to be at his beck and call. That's not how it works. Along the way he's using his pen to emphasize a point and I am mesmerized as it repeatedly pokes through the package he's holding - I can barely hear what he's saying because I can't really believe he's actually poking that hard.

We come up with a solution for his "problem" which involves him writing instructions. I hand him something to write on and turn to help other customers, who've been rolling there eyes at him as he babbles and complains and repeats himself even after I've repeated what he said back to him to make sure we're on the same page.

He cuts back to the front of the line to hand me the paper. "That's a G," he says, pointing to an elaborate capital cursive G. "If you print it, it looks like a 6, so I used a General Mills G."

WHOA.

1) If you learned how to print neatly, a capital G does not look like a 9.
2) Since when is it a General Mills G? Do they have a trademark now on ALL capital cursive G's?

Number 6

My cousin Harrison turned six today. I eventually escaped the madness that was work today and went to his party. He's not really my cousin, he's my second cousin. Using the phrasing of the SAT's verbal section: My age is to my cousin's age (his father) as Harrison's age is to mine. Roughly. When my brother & sister & I were kids, our cousin came out from the east coast to his true home, the west coast, and stayed with us for a few months until he got an apartment. We picked on him, and he picked on us. Then his girlfriend moved out, and they got married and did fun stuff with us, like take us to Finnigan's and Powell's and Psycho Safeway (should it be Sycho Safeway?) which was near their super cool downtown apartment.

Then they had kids, who are 6 and almost 4, and we do the same thing for them. We pick on them, and they pick on us, and now they're old enough for us to take to do fun stuff, like go to Powell's and get gelato afterwards. It's nice and cyclical. The weird part was how I got suddenly emotional when we were singing happy birthday - here he is, in kindergarten. Before he was the tiny baby with huge feet and tons of hair (my then 10-year-old brother was holding him and accidentally poked him on his umbilical cord stump and all of his limbs suddenly stuck straight out with shock). What happened?

The Future
Tomorrow, Oly. Next, the world. I may or may not update, depending on whether we manage to shut up and blog or we just go hog wild talking.