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Twice daily his Uncle’s staff cleaned the pneumatic doors of the SaveMart™ When the doors opened there was only the hint of the wheeze one heard when entering other stores. The doors were the quickest in the province. They never jammed. Patrons did not have to stamp on the entrance mat or wave their hands in front of the mounted sensor. The doors could anticipate your approach and slide open silently allowing entrance. If someone were to walk by too close the glass doors would rush open expectantly and then slowly close, embarrassed at having jumped to such a conclusion. Or bidding you to think again about coming into the store.
Tom walked in and said hello to the well-groomed greeter his Uncle always placed at the entrance. Always a fresh, clean shaved youth or a prim, sexless elderly woman. To his right, a bulletin board stated that no bills be posted without express permission from the management. There were no bills but that one. The cork was replaced on the first of every month to allow for a fresh-looking community board. On his left shopping carts glistened in the artificial light. There were no coin deposit boxes on the carts. There were boys to collect the carts in the lot; his Uncle felt no need to entice his customers to return carts on their own accord. Yet, despite this lack of motivation, the lot was always cleared and new gleaming carts awaited potential customers wherever they were, their placement strategically designed by Uncle for optimal pick-up and drops. Along the front of the store, the checkout lanes were equipped with clean, efficient women in matching uniforms, with their hair sculpted in similar bobs. Their movements synchronized so every scanner went off at the same time, so the random bleeping would be less obtrusive to customers. Box boys with neatly ironed green aprons scoured the aisles behind customers, replacing the things people took from the shelves and giving the store the appearance of being perpetually well-stocked.
One of the box-boys was removing groceries from a young mothers’ cart and placing them in another despite her protests. Tom noticed the wheel of her cart was askew and spinning, not quite touching the ground. “It’s no problem, ma’am, really,” the lad said as he took her baby and an economy-sized package of toilet paper and planted them both carefully and expertly in the new, polished cart with all wheels making contact with the floor.
The cashiers smiled at Tom cordially. Although Tom frequented his Uncles’ store infrequently, all staff knew him. Not that he was remarkable or especially memorable, but all staff had a collection of tapes to improve memory, required listening upon being hired. In this way, they could easily recall any and all items in the store, as well as names and faces of customers. His Uncle was so sold on the idea of the memory tapes that he had given Tom a set as a Christmas present some years before. Tom had tried the techniques for a while and then misplaced the tapes. He was too ashamed to tell his Uncle he forgot where they were and to ask for a replacement.
His Uncle’s office was up one set of stairs and looked over the entire store via a one-way mirror. From there, his Uncle could watch all the aisles to make sure they were faced properly. As soon as a customer took something from a shelf, a box boy was behind them, replacing the item. The shelves always looked full and complete. Just as the floors always looked shined to a sheen. As well, Uncle had a direct view of the florescent lighting so that if one even threatened to flicker, its location was pinpointed, and a boy was sent up a precarious ladder to twist the bulbs or replace them. God help the boy who dropped either the new or the old bulb and let it shatter to the floor. It happened only once. The mess was cleaned expediently but the boy was not heard from again.
The blinking red lights on the security cameras guided Tom up the stairs to the office doors. He buzzed and waited. Soon the door opened and Tom stood looking at owl-like eyes staring through the crack in the door, darting back and forth.
“Yes?” Jude was Uncle’s receptionist. Although she and Tom had met several times, Tom often felt that each time was a new experience for her. An unexpected visitor was a wrinkle in an otherwise productive, routine day. She did not veil annoyance. Tom thought of her as the moat guarding a castle.
“Hello, Jude,” Tom said to the eyes in the crack of the door. “It’s Tom Ryder. I’d like to see my Uncle.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“Yes, I do. We talked. The other day we made an appointment for today. Not an appointment, but we talked on the phone, and he said come by. Today. You know, not at any specific time, or anything. Or even necessarily today, even,” Tom stuttered.
“So, you don’t have an appointment.”
“No.” It was always an interrogation. She would drag the truth slowly out of him. “But I did say I’d drop by.”
“...”
“Sometime this week.”
“Might drop by?” The eyes bobbed up and down and the door opened wider, giving Tom momentary hope. But even he could not miss the irony in her polite screeching voice, “On the chance that he might be in?”
“That’s right.” Tom felt his scrotum tighten and a cool bead of sweat run from his neck down his back.
“It’s a fairly unwise proposition, isn’t it?” Jude opened the door wider still, “Taking a chance and coming all the way down here on the off chance that a busy man like your Uncle would be sitting here, waiting and wondering when you were going to show up.”
“Well,” Tom said when he felt she was through, “is he in?”
“He is in. Yes. But what if he weren’t?”
“But he is.”
“And if he wasn’t?”
“Does it matter?” Tom spat, “I came down to see him and he’s in. What could it possibly matter if I over-speculated? It paid off, I’m here, and he’s here. End of story. Let me see him, the rest is none of your concern.” He was sweating now. These conversations took place regularly enough for Tom to dread them. Always he felt the urge to throw something.
“Are you telling me how to run your Uncle’s office?” Jude said after a moment. The door was open but she stood with her hand on the knob and her hip near the jam. “Because it sounds like you’re telling me how to run your Uncle’s office.”
“I’m not trying to tell you how to run my Uncle’s office,” Tom said.
“Well, I’ll tell you what, it most certainly sounds like you’re...”
“Jude!” His Uncle’s voice boomed from somewhere in the room. Tom watched as Jude’s body tensed and her eyes went still and focused on something past his shoulder. As though she were listening for a faint voice. Or the next commandment from Zeus. “Do not badger the employees!”
“It’s not an employee, it’s your nephew,” she screeched in Tom’s face.
“Billy?” Uncle shouted, “What a surprise! Send him on in!”
“No, it’s Tom.”
There was a pause long enough for another droplet of sweat to make its quick descent down Tom’s back. “Does he have an appointment?” his Uncle said.
Though his Uncle’s office was twenty, maybe thirty feet from where Tom stood, he felt he could hear a sigh, the creak of a man getting slowly out of his chair and the trudge of footsteps to the door to greet him. His Uncle stood in the doorway and appeared the same as Tom always remembered him. He was tall, balding, and had large outdated eye-glasses that seemed to provide more prescription for his cheeks. He seemed to always look over Tom’s head when they were speaking - or rather, when his Uncle spoke to Tom - giving the impression that, as with Jude, they were meeting for the first time. There was no familial greeting, no memories of the man when he was young. To Tom, his Uncle could have been any man he was acquainted with.
“Come in, Tom,” his Uncle said. Jude disappeared to her desk and Tom followed his Uncle. It was like a parody of an executive office on the top floor of a metropolitan building. Instead of the windows facing a breathtaking skyline, his Uncle’s view consisted of the tops of aisles of groceries. In his Uncle’s skyline view, the sky itself was always overcast and gray and metallic. Mirrors placed strategically allowed a view between every aisle and Tom watched guests lazily placing items in their carts and box boys busily filling the gaps left behind. It seemed to Tom that his Uncle always had one eye halfway fixed on the mirrors so he could watch everything that went on his store. It could have just been a lazy eye.
Once they were seated properly with Uncle behind his desk and slightly higher than Tom, who slouched to enable the perception of power to tip further in Uncle’s favour. “I know I called you and said drop by, but you should have made an appointment,” he began.
“I was in the neighbourhood, though, and I thought, uh, why not?” Tom tried to remain relaxed and casual.
“Yes, Thomas, but other people have very different jobs from yours.” He sounded like Tom’s mother. He even took her mannerisms, as though they were brother and sister. “They are required to do things at certain times. Unscheduled interruptions are not a good thing.”
“Can you actually schedule an interruption?” Tom asked innocently.
“Thomas, come on, let’s get to the point,” Uncle said. “But learn this valuable lesson if you want to succeed in business. Businessmen are busy people. Make an appointment.”
“I will,” Tom gulped.
“The thing is I had a little scare the other day, as your mother no doubt told you,” Uncle said, reclining. “I was working late last Thursday night and there weren’t many employees left in the store...”
‘Uncle’s Narrow Escape’
...maybe just the janitors, who mostly wore headphones and listened to music. Uncle finished up with the ordering and scheduling for the week and let his lazy eye drift over the landscape of his store. And there, along the third spotless ballast, a florescent tube was flickering, and its counterpart was already blackened. He hesitated before making a note to have Gerald up to fix it first thing in the morning. He hesitated because he felt so invigorated after an evening of hard work, he felt powerful at that moment. He felt self-sufficient. It would take about a half-hour to change the bulbs himself. He wouldn’t bother to call his wife; what was one more hour. It was work after all.
Uncle was feeling his age by the time he found the tubes in aisle 8 and pulled the extension ladder from storage. He balanced the tubes in his hand and climbed slowly, rung by rung, up the ladder to the ballast, higher than he expected. When he got to the top and realized he had both hands full and no way to change the bulbs, he cursed his incompetence and poor planning. In his haste, he lost his footing as soon as he began his descent. Sacrificing the new bulbs, he let them smash to the floor and threw his arms out to grab hold of something, anything. He was near the modest hardware section of his grocery store and as he fell sideways his belt loops caught on the industrial-sized hooks used to display the larger items.
He hung upside down perhaps six feet from the floor. He knew that were his belt loop to let go, he would smash face-first into the hard tile. It would hurt a lot and there would be bones broken and hospitals to attend. In that moment he knew he needed some sort of insurance. Not life insurance, of course. He could have died, certainly, but the thought was conveniently pushed to the back of his mind as his business concerns revealed themselves through his epiphany. What would happen, should he be unable to run the store? Would the whole enterprise fall apart? There must be some disability insurance he was lacking.
After one of the janitors arrived and got over a mild laughing fit and helped him down two hours later, Uncle resolved to call his nephew Tom. Yes, he would give his own blood the chance at a business venture. That is what family is for, to help with your business ventures.
“Tom, my agent is Wally, I don’t think he’d mind if I shot some business your way,” Uncle concluded. “So, do you have anything in mind?”
Tom didn’t have a clue. “I have a couple ideas,” he said. “I will put something together for you.”
“Good.” Uncle stood and by standing indicated the meeting closed. “Make an appointment with whatsername when you get something put together.”
“I will, and thank you, Uncle,” Tom grovelled while wondering about a commission on a policy for his Uncle. It would be at least enough to get the cable back on.
He watched Jude type. He thought she would acknowledge him when she moved to a new paragraph, or closed an application, indicating one job complete. When she did not seem to see him, Tom gently touched the side of her desk and said, “My Uncle wants me to make an appointment.”
“What’s it regarding?” she shot out at her computer screen.
“Insurance,” Tom said quickly. “Life insurance. And disability, I guess.”
“You’re not Wally.” Jude paused on her keyboard long enough for Tom to breathe.
“No, I’m not,” Tom said. “I am helping Wally out because of my Uncle.”
Jude clicked open her planner. “Thursday at 3:30. You get one hour at his discretion.” She was typing Tom’s name into the allotted time slot. “Please do not come early and stand around staring at me. And do not come late and put me behind.” She peered over her glasses into Tom’s eyes. He fumbled behind him for the door and skidded to the bottom of the stairs.
Tom floated on air as walked through the store. “Hello Charles,” he called out to Charles. “Hello Carla,” he shouted to Debbie who nodded and didn’t bother to correct him. “How are the kids?” he said to a cashier he hoped had kids. He was elated. He had an appointment and, by extension, a guaranteed sale. A sale! It wasn’t exactly what he was hoping for, it was a family member and not a true prospect, but it did fill him with a sort of confidence that had been lacking. He could do this. Uncle was frightened enough by his near-death (or near-broken-face) experience to think about looking at his financial coverage. He was disturbed. Tom saw the theory in action. You had to disturb the client. Tom was starting to understand. The pneumatic doors opened with a whoosh and in Tom’s mind they rang out like a Ta-Da!