Wordzzle No #72

My apologies for writing yet another story about a disgruntled worker. Guess it must say something about the way i feel about my job right now!

For rules and so forth visit http://ravensviews.blogspot.com/

Mini

lavender cowboy, over the moon, preparation, zebra, area rug

Medium

corn pone, delegation, nectarines, happiness, 12 going on 13, prancing horses, magenta, butterflies, fragmentary, arthritis

Mega – include all the words listed above

Mini

Lavender Cowboy (putting the sic back into country music)

Well I’ve rode the midnight highway, on a zebra painted blue
And I’ve made my preparation, as we went back to the zoo
When the headlights started fading, you know I’ll still be true
So I sing about a lavender cowboy, or I’ll surely eat my shoe
Yes I sing about my lavender cowboy, or I’ll surely eat my shoe

Though my carpet may be fading, my area rug is new
Though my body may be weary, you always keep me true
When my feelings take me over the moon, I know I’ll still have you
So I sing about a lavender cowboy, or I’ll surely eat my shoe
Yes I sing about my lavender cowboy, or I’ll surely eat my shoe

Medium

Cookery For Numpties (or all the things TV Chefs never tell you)
(Numpties – silly people or someone who does something daft)

1) arrive home in a bad mood having listened to inane chatter all day until your brain split into fragmentary pieces
2) Look at the mountain of washing up and remind yourself that you can’t simply have beans on toast again
3) Spend half an hour trying to clear enough space on the side to make dinner
4) Open fridge
5) Look at contents of fridge in despair
6) Go to the shelf containing the cookery books and find the recipe that has a) not too many ingredients that you don’t have and b) has the least number of pages eaten by butterflies
7) Spend twenty minutes with a calculator trying to convert the meal-for-six proportions into a correct amount for one person before eventually conceding that this is the meal you will be eating cold for the next six evenings
8) Start to prepare the ingredients
9) Get half-way through measuring the ingredients and realise that what you thought said “12 going on 13” tables of castor oil was a misprint.
10) Start preparing ingredients from scratch
11) Realise that you are fresh out of nectarines
12) Realise that you are fresh out of corn pone
13) Realise that you have no idea what the hell corn pone is and that it would probably have been a good idea to check this in the first place.
14) Spend ten minutes on Wikipedia and decide that grapes and half a wholemeal loaf will just have to do instead.
15) Mix the ingredients
16) End up with a magenta-goo all over the wall
17) Ring your elderly parent/friend for advice and spend half an hour listening to them complain about their arthritis, but come away none the wiser
18) At this point some people may chose the optional ingredient of going mad and singing a song about prancing horses
19) Look at the clock in horror and realise that your dream of going straight to bed is still no nearer
20) Realise that true happiness lies in the art of delegation and call the pizza delivery man
21) Bury the meal you made quietly at midnight under the light of the full moon

Mega

The Samples Girl

Nicky plastered on her best customer-friendly smile and smoothed down her purple apron. The smile was well practiced and practically flawless: only the closest of observers would have noticed the tension lines around the side and deduced that it did not denote true happiness.

She closed her eyes, counted to ten and then let off a stream of expletives that would have shocked the coarsest of builders before opening the door of the toilets, adjusting her magenta lipstick, washing her hands and proceeding to the shop floor. All this: the bullet-proof smile, the swear-words, the lipstick and the tiniest amount of alcohol were all just part of her daily preparation for her job at Fresco.

She had worked out fairly early into her tenure as Samples Girl that she would need a technique to survive the banality of the questions she would face on a daily basis, a technique that would stop her from taking a cleaver from the meat counter and committing murder.

Life hadn’t always been like this: she had spent twelve going on thirteen years as a personal secretary, undermining a millionaire’s wife to the point where he was ready to dump the bitch and elope with her: then the bastard had been killed by a zebra and she had gone to the bank. Four years answering customer complaints had given Nicky the ability to answer any query with a degree of politeness that was veering so far towards sarcasm that 90% of her customers came away feeling insulted without quite knowing why.

And then the credit crunch had come and she had found herself working on the samples counter, squashed by the nectarines and the kumquats, breathing in a daily dose of halitosis from an endless supply of moronic shoppers.

She reached her spot, unsurprised to find that she would be sharing it with a display of hand cream that left her with little room to breathe. Nevertheless she laid down the little area-rug with the “Stop Me And Try One” motif and assembled her products. What were they expecting her to sell today? She looked at the packet and saw it was called Kent’s Traditional Corn Pone. Jesus, why did the bastards have to be so smug with their names: couldn’t they just call them bread rolls and be done with it?

Tim, the Duty Manager with the roving hands, approached her from behind the cornflakes, ‘Morning Nicky’

‘Tim’ Nicky replied shortly, silently imagining a gang of prancing horses appearing and stampeding him to death. Having a conversation with Tim was like being mugged by butterflies.

Tim, as blissfully unaware of any sarcasm as ever, smiled with the happiness that only comes to insignificant nobody’s who have acquired a degree of power to wield and are determined to make everyone beneath them totally miserable, ‘You did well last week with that aftershave…what was it called again?’

‘Lavender Cowboy’ Nicky replied, failing to add that almost all of the twenty-seven bottles she’d sold had gone to the same sixty-eight year old man. He had said that he didn’t mind the picture of the bare-chested man on the bottle wearing nothing but a leather thong and chaps, and that he was over the moon to have found something that cured his arthritis at the same time as covering the otherwise persistent smell of wee.

The tannoy cut into life above their heads, announcing in fragmentary bursts of information that a member of Customer Services was required at the check-out.

Nicky tried not to let the relief show too visibly on her face as Tim nodded and clicked his heels together, grateful for once that where delegation was concerned he was totally agnostic.
As he trotted off with a steady clip-clop of patent leather shoes Nicky adjusted her smile and turned the full force of her personality on an unsuspecting customer, ‘Croissant madam?’ she asked…with just the slightest hint of malice.