The Mumble Fish

If you work around people long enough you will learn there are just some people who have totally missed the boat when it comes to saying anything intelligible. Let's take Ozzy Osbourne for example, he's British and I'm positive that he's not speaking English. I don't know what it is that he's speaking, but it's not English. But even Ozzy can articulate finer speech than the trout mouth I had the displeasure of dealing with today.

First, I'm standing around running my yap, because it's retail and that's what we do. This guy walks up with a bag in his hand and says something like, "hrmahlf garble eat teeth alksfoi jeans here?", and I said "do you want to return something?" He responded with "jasjdilo" and shakes his head yes. God bless the head shaking...

So I proceed to return these jeans and there is this odor of old chili, cigarette smoke and something else I can't quite explain, but it made my stomach turn. That takes a lot considering I've had my head entirely too close to the nether regions of a cadaver. I look at the guy and he's got food stuck to his face and something yellow smeared around. It looked as if he got punched in the face by a field of angry dandelions. Then, while I was circling the item being returned on his receipt I asked to see his drivers license. This crazy shoves his license into my face and I almost lost my left eye and my temper. I happened to look at his signature on the license and he apparently writes as well as he speaks because it looked like an EKG machine wrote his signature for him.

Well, big surprise here..he'd missed the 30 day return mark by over a month, so I was forced to give him a gift card. If there's any way to piss off a mumble fish it's telling them they can't have cash back. He spewed out something that had the word cash in it and I said "No, you can have a gift card or take your jeans back, those are your options." He takes the gift card and storms off cursing me in a fashion that made my co-worker nearly collapse trying to hold in his laughter. All I could say was "what did he just say?? stupid mumble fish, what WAS that?!"

Story gets better, the guy went down to the denim department to use his gift card and spent another hour and a half trying on approximaltey 50 pairs of jeans. He then yelled at the sales guy because stylish jeans have holes in them and he doesn't like dark jeans. He finally picks a suitable pair and "Denim Neal" says, "Now, when you return these, because I know you will, please do it within 30 days."

3 hours later Denim Neal says to me, "I kept smelling this awful smell and it was those jeans! I can't rid of that guy!"

This mumble fish will make my novel, along with the special ed king who used to ask me for extra small condoms at Meijer, and the cross dressing old man. Oh, and that dyke who wore flannel and Old Spice.