canning it

Although my lens is effectively sold I popped to a nearish-by secondhand lens shop today to see if they'd be interested in it (and to what monetary degree) on the offchance that they gave a better offer. I thought it would be the sort of thing they'd quite like seeing as it's a fully-functioning and optically perfect version of what they tried to sell me two years ago before I took their inferior and lightly-fecked model back and bought new from the internet. They obviously have to get stock from somewhere; their window is full of secondhand lenses. I've previously only encountered the bloke I understand to be the owner: a gentleman of unsurpassed surly grumpiness and owner of an air of unwillingness-to-help that extends several feet beyond the confines of the shop. Today the desk was occupied by a significantly jollier and chattier bloke, whom I initially considered to be an improvement until he exploded in patronising mirth at the very idea that a secondhand camera shop would perhaps want to buy a good-quality lens, particularly not a 60mm f/2.8D micro (another small snort of incredulous laughter). Dearie me, no. Cretin. When the lens's replacement arrives from the internet it will be extremely tempting to email the shop to inform them of the potential sale they lost due to their variously strange attitudes to customer service. Could be a step too far. Maybe in another thirty years.

A further means of describing someone previously described as "abandoned as a baby in an office and raised by managers" occurred to me today. "The sort of person who'd write a five-point agenda to sit down and eat their breakfast" captures another character aspect of but still completely fails to describe the utter mindless tedium with which the entity in question can infuse any topic or activity. What should have been a simple and short question and less simple and less short but still fairly short answer this morning turned into a ten-minute progressively-simpler-terms exploration of the degree to which concepts I had considered fairly universal (in the relatively confined sphere of business-system-terminology much of our everyday work involves) are apparently strange and new to the explanation-recipient. I have been forced to go over my (clear and sober) memories of the department christmas night out when I found myself explaining the differences between a £20 camera from Argos and one which cost a lot more when questioned. The expression I had initially interpreted as slightly-drunk-not-quite-getting-it is exactly the same as workplace-utter-incomprehension. There's a chance they're the same thing, underneath.