Wait...What?

Before my children were very old, I worked in retail in order to obtain Christmas cash. Aside from occasionally telling a customer that their glasses were on their head, or that the purse they were looking for was on their elbow under the package they were holding, nothing out of the ordinary happened.

Until…

One afternoon, as I was working in an upscale department store before the fall season kicked into high gear, I was working in the men’s department on a quieter than usual day. As I unpacked and folded dress shirts for a display, I noticed my co-workers suddenly dispersed and left me standing alone. I looked up the aisle and walking toward me, was a little old man.

He was tan with stark white hair and wore plaid golfing slacks with a pink pull over shirt. He walked bent over and as he progressed, he swung his arms at his sides as though pushing the air to gain traction for his journey. As he arrived before me, he pushed his expensive sunglasses up onto his head and flashed me a bright smile.

“Here’s the drill.” He told me. “I wear a 29-29 in pants. I like khaki golf pants in assorted colors and prints." At this, he plucked the fabric of his pants forward in an effort to demonstrate his meaning.

"I usually wait in the dressing room," he said. "And then the salespeople bring me seven or eight pair to try on. The ones I want to buy, I’ll toss over. Your job, is to stand outside the dressing room until I’m finished and catch the ones I’m going to get.”

“Yes sir.” I responded with a nod. In my mind, it didn’t matter how eccentric he was, this man was a customer, and I had a job to do. After depositing him in a dressing room, I rushed around collecting pants and took him eight pair. I confess, I am pretty good at sizing people up. I took a gamble that originally, he may have worn a 29-29, but looking at him, I could see that he had shrunk with age and would need a 28 in length. The store I worked at actually carried odd sizes so I made sure to select things I knew without a doubt would fit him. It wasn't an easy thing to come up with 8 pair that he could take home that day without having them altered, but I managed.

I handed the man the pants and stood outside the dressing room, which was only closed by a sliding curtain. As I was catching the third pair, a lady came into the department and asked me to ring up the tie she was buying for her husband. My coworkers had left to keep from having to do any actual work, so I explained to the man in the dressing room that I had to take care of a customer. I told him that he could continue tossing the pants he wanted over the partition, and I would pick them up when I came back.

I rang the lady up, with the addition of some cuff links she hadn’t thought of and a nice tie pin, then returned to my other customer. As I arrived at the dressing room, I saw that several pants littered the floor, and that the activity in the dressing room had discontinued.

Shrugging, I bent down to pick up the slacks on the floor, and as I did so, in my peripheral vision, there appeared a bare pair of knobby knees, black dress socks, and light blue boxers. I looked over, and the old man was standing there, looking perplexed.

I raised my eyebrows slightly to which he responded:

“I think I throwed mine out.”