THE SONIC BOOMER
2020 is supposed to be my year. I’ve looked at various timetables and horoscopes and the Chinese system of lucky numbers and rolled it all together with my birth date. I’ve added 2-0-2-0 and gotten 4 (one of my two luckiest numbers), so this is definitely the year.
I vowed to buy a lottery ticket every week. I bought one ticket, and then life got in the way of my getting more. I may have already missed my calling to be a millionaire! But I am ready to accept my lucky, lucky fate at any time. Like most lottery ticket purchasers, I have mentally spent the money many times over. I’ll have homes in the four corners of the U.S. I’ll decorate them and sell them and start again, like Ellen DeGeneres does. Or I won’t sell them at all! I’ll get Mark the boat of his dreams — a boat so big, they’ll have to call it a ship. I’ll spoil my kids rotten; the grandkids, worse. I’ll lavish gifts upon my friends and readers — that’s you!
But before you get your hopes up, I must admit that things haven’t started off all that well this year. My stores, in particular, are giving me fits. The plumber was at the south store all day Saturday, charging by the hour even though he ended up putting in a whole new toilet anyway.
The front door has been adjusted so it closes more slowly, and now the security sensors above it don’t work.
The air conditioning fan won’t stop running, so my husband installed a new thermostat, and this new thermostat won’t communicate with the old air conditioning system. The a/c is still running; still making the electric meter spin around; still costing me money to cool an already-cool building — but now I will have to pay an AC guy to come out, charge me by the hour and perhaps tell me I need a whole new air conditioner.
But the cherry on top of this lucky, lucky cake was the call I got from the manager of the north store, telling me she wanted to let one of our clerks go. “Why?” I asked. “I thought you liked that clerk.”
“Well, a couple of things,” she said. “I popped in the other day just before 5 p.m. to drop off some papers, and he was telling incoming customers, ‘You’d better hurry up; we’re closing!’”
“Not good.”
“Someone wanted to look at an armoire along the back wall, and he told me to help them.”
“Why you?”
“Well, he was busy with his laptop. It was open on the counter. He was watching porn.”
“What? At the counter? Could the customers see it?”
“No, but when I gasped, the lady checking out said, ‘I don’t even want to know.’”
There followed an uncomfortable conversation about what to do next which, unfortunately, did not allow for my flying up there with a baseball bat.
I calmed down a few days later, but you can see where my lucky year is not off to a great start. So don’t quit your day job in anticipation of my lavishing gifts upon you.
