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One of the acts seen on the Krakow stage many years ago was the amazing regurgitator, a man who swallowed a number of objects and then brought up a specific item at the request of the audience.
I feel as if I’m about to recreate this stage act with the newly restored Off Topic forum, systematically spewing up my post-marital experiences one by one in all their nauseating detail to attain the dubious catharsis my therapist claims I’m in desperate need of.
I sincerely hope the Internet Bedouin who accidentally wanders in here will enjoy the contents of my guts!
Today’s post is a sad story of a man much abused. What should have been a joyous tale is no more than a pathetic account of misery and despondency.
But let’s start at the beginning:
I, Jerzy Stanislaw Ludwik Sliwa, formerly of sound mind and body, have crossed the Rubicon... into the hitherto alien province of the computer DVD.
When my wife took the long walk a fortnight ago, she bagged the stand-alone DVD player – which was a pretty mean thing to do considering I’d just spent a month’s salary on the James Bond boxed (tinned, actually) set.
I couldn’t afford to replace this particular piece of equipment so I opted for a cheap DVD plug-in for my modest computer (little more than a glorified word processor with a modem). My technical knowledge is totally non existent, so I searched for on-line advice about what to look out for. The next day, encumbered with a ream of Internet print-outs and a wallet stuffed with funny-money banknotes, I caught a bus to Trehtar-Ag, a highly respected Polish-Israeli computer emporium on the outskirts of Krakow.
In case you’re wondering, “Trehtar-Ag” is an Aramaic expression coined in 5,601 BC by Emmanuel Cohen, a door-to-door salesperson who made his first million shekels selling tablets to Biblical prophets ("guaranteed to withstand the finger of God or your money back!"). The phrase cropped up recently in a Polish academic paper which described the work being carried out by a team of Aramaic graphologists at the University of Damascus. The classical department there has spent the last 52 years analysing a mummified bagel that has inscribed on it (in eight languages) this archaic phrase. It constitutes a codicil to an agreement contracting Cohen to deliver two tablets to a certain Moses Reisenkampf in 5,602 BC. A close analysis of the cuneiform handwriting has recently proved that Cohen was dyslexic and had intended to write not “Trehtar” but “Trehtor”. Unfortunately, the Syrian philologists’ limited knowledge of typical mistakes made by dyslexic users of ancient Aramaic prevented them from recognising Cohen’s intention. Consequently, the erroneous rendering All bow before the wrath of God is the one that appears above the Krakovian computer store’s logo. The correct translation, which has just been validated by academia, reads more accurately: There's one born every day!
So there I was, taking deep life-threatening breaths of what passes for air in Krakow while standing on the threshold of Trehtar-Ag.
The shop was truly awe-inspiring for a first-time visitor like myself.
The facade was a spectacularly hideous melange of architectural styles that only a warped, Polish imagination in a state of Lebanese Red-induced euphoria could have dreamt up.
Two black plate-glass windows bearing ten-inch Gothic gilt lettering straddled a huge marble portico. A liver-brown awning extended from a second floor parapet to the kerb at a height of about eight feet. Adorning the unpainted wooden frame of the canopy were a dozen bile-coloured tassels...
I don't quite know where to begin in enumerating the adjectives that came to mind when I beheld this post-modern structure: to do justice to the overall effect would exhaust the resources of the best thesaurus. All I can say is that the building did not fail to make an impression - not too difficult an accomplishment for an entity that looked like the end-product of architectural copulation between a funeral parlour and a Kurdish encampment.
The time was exactly 5.57pm.
I mention this only because I expected the shop to be totally empty. According to a recent survey, 99.9997% of the population of Krakow are glued every afternoon to their TV screens between 5.45 and 6.40 pm. This is when Big Brother is broadcast. It’s the only programme on TV that Polish health inspectors recommend for brain damaged viewers. ("You think you’re stupid? Just watch these cretins and see what real stupidity means!") The Polish version of Big Brother is the only one not to limit itself to twelve contestants. The Big Brother flat in Warsaw houses the entire population of southern Poland. Every week, one contestant is voted out by viewers. There are approximately 12,366,040 contestants to go before we have the play-off between the last two. The programme has been running for three years now and the three cellphone companies that sponsor Big Brother have just purchased Albania with their after-tax profits.
Unfortunately, the 0.0003% of the population of Krakow who were not watching Big Brother were crammed into Trehtar-Ag. I'd forgotten to register in my microscopic brain that Polish computer geeks get their sexual kicks not from Big Brother bimbos (parading themselves in the all-together in order to ingratiate themselves with their ten-year-old fans), but from a computer joy-stick propped between those withered appendages commonly known as legs.
Apart from the enormous tubular steel counter, the shop resembled, from the inside, a Gothic horror film set rather than a high-tech retail outlet. The poorly lit, L-shaped room was carpeted in blood red, and furnished with intricately carved teak chairs and tables upon which were displayed sepia photographs of...no, not dismembered remains of Hammer House of Horror victims but innocuous-looking computers. Dominating the oak-panelled walls was a two-metre framed photograph of a buxom brunette holding an apple in her left hand and a palm-top computer in her right. Nothing spectacular you may think. Until I add that the lady in question was wearing nothing more than a computer mouse.
I use the word ”wear” advisedly.
In fact, the mouse was, for want of a better word, ”stuck” onto a part of her anatomy that my Jesuit teachers at High School used to refer to as ”one’s nether regions”. It had the shape of a fig leaf and clearly this scantily-clad woman was meant to be Eve in a 21st century Garden of Eden. Whatever method they used to keep that device in place, the woman didn’t seem to mind. On the contrary, judging by the expression on her face, I’d say she wasn’t at all averse to being nibbled at by the electronic rodent.
The well-manicured gentleman holding vigil in front of this provocative wall decoration looked almost human in his horn-rimmed glasses and grey flannel suit. He was as bald as a badger’s bottom and had zits on his face the size of the Himalayan foothills. Definitely (I pride myself on my ability to judge character at a glance) the kind of chap who could be trusted to give you a fair deal.
Like in most countries, the job of a Polish shop assistant is not a glamorous or particularly satisfying one. For the most part the work is mechanical and monotonous and consists of four basic duties:
a) answering the same three or four asinine questions ninety-six times a day;
b) issuing pay-in slips to customers;
c) checking and filing away (on a six-inch nail) cash receipts issued by the
cash desk;
d) wrapping up customers' purchases.
Unbeknownst to Jerzy S.L. Sliwa, the aforementioned Trehtar-Ag employee had had a singularly rotten day.
He’d had enough pain-in the-arse customers that day to last him ten consecutive reincarnations. I’m talking about patrons whose sole ambition is to make miserable the lives of as many shop assistants as possible by asking a large number of cretinous questions and buying absolutely nothing. Less than sixty minutes before closing-time, the Trehtar-Ag salesman in question was looking for an appropriate client to bear the full brunt of his pent-up frustration before scurrying off to his hole in the wall. Imagine the assistant's elation as his finely-tuned nostrils caught the unmistakable scent, a split second after I had crossed the threshold, of a bona fide victim.
Despite the fact that hordes of customers were buzzing around like blue-arsed flies, very few shop assistants were in evidence, so I fought my way over to the counter with the dermatologically-challenged employee and faced him like a wannabe Ringo Kid. Although I had every intention of buying a DVD that day, I wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t be taken to the cleaners by this would-be Taras Bulba, who looked as busy as a one-armed paper-hanger. Having cleared my throat in fair approximation of Little Boy exploding over Hiroshima, I stared the gentleman straight in the eye and laid down my terms:
[We need the voice of the narrator here, reminding readers that the following conversation took place in Polish. My poor translation tries to capture the spirit of the dialogue rather than the letter. On a technical point, the computer terminology has been invented because I can’t remember the jargon that was actually used.]
”I wanna computer DVD!" I swaggered, in a terrible imitation of a Polish John Wayne. “Fast and the size of a matchbox!"
The shop assistant smiled a toothy grin. "If you'd like to follow me, sir," he replied, and escorted me to the rear end of the showroom. "I think this is what you're looking for," he proclaimed grandiloquently and proceeded to draw back a non-existent curtain covering multi-limbed bodies of gleaming plastic. "This is it!" he repeated to no-one in particular, and waited with bated breath for the "oooh's" and "aaah's" that failed to materialize.
"How much?" I asked, doing my best to sound blase and tossing in a six-inch yawn for good measure.
The salesman cast a contemptuous scowl in my direction. "This much, sir." He aimed a cartilaginous finger at one of the price tags.
I stared incredulously at the ridiculously low figure and before you could say "non-optional extras" I’d whipped out my bulging wallet and was counting out the zlotys with the alacrity of a sex-starved Samurai in a geisha's boudoir. "I'll take it!" I said, thinking I had the bargain of the century within my grasp.
He raised his head slowly. “What computer do you have?”
I did my miserable best to describe the black box in the corner of my soundtrack room.
He smiled at me again. "So we’ll be taking all the peripherals, won’t we?"
Peripherals? Hm... As I had no idea what he was talking about, I was obliged to weigh up my possible responses very carefully. A moment's cogitation resulted in the following short-list:
1. the intelligent response: swallow my pride and ask the chap to explain;
2. the moronic response: save face and bluff it out.
I chose, naturally, the latter. "But of course!" I exclaimed in a know-it-all sort of voice.
"Extra memory?”
Memory for a DVD??? I smiled back at him and nodded.
"XDS lubric processor? The proverbial black clouds were piling up ominously.
"Sure!” I replied. ”I wouldn’t leave the shop without one!”
"Megatron Sonic Distributor?"
"Obviously!" This was getting very strange.
"Biconvectional discombobulator?"
What the blazes was going on? I wanted a DVD player, not apparatus for Frankenstein’s laboratory! I looked benignly at the shop assistant and hoped that he couldn’t read my thoughts. "That would be nice." I said calmly.
I experienced that sinking feeling you get when you know you’ve made a dreadful mistake.
"Full Internet software support?"
I nodded vigorously. This, at least, I recognised.
"5-year guarantee extension?"
"I think that goes without saying."
"And an F4 DVD reclonometer?"
A what??!! I picked my jaw of the floor and spluttered, "I wouldn't be without one!”
”Of course you wouldn’t,” the man replied. ”It’s expensive, but you won’t regret it in years to come.”
Like hell I won’t! I was already regretting it!
”That’s about it,” he said, flicking through a DVD catalogue the size of the average Polish bathroom. ”I was going to suggest a bi-axial triculator but I think we can do without it for now.”
Inwardly, I heaved a sigh of relief: the bi-axial triculator sounded like a bloody expensive device.
”He gave me that infuriating smile again. “You can spend the 4 zlotys it costs on something else.”
That's $1 in normal money.
One miserable buck! Why couldn’t he keep the bloody reclonometer instead!!
I braced myself for the ultimate question: "What does all this come to?" My voice was trembling on the edge of audibility.
"Sorry?"
"What does it come to?” I heard my voice faintly and from a long way off. "In total?"
I looked at the shop assistant. He was smiling at me with a mixture of hearty cheerfulness and supreme pity, as though I were about to expire and he had come to give me the last rites.
"Just a moment, sir" He produced a pencil with the deftness of a conjurer and jotted down a string of impossibly long numbers on crested notepaper. With stunning legerdemain the pencil metamorphosed into a diminutive pocket calculator, and I watched with growing dismay as the already huge number of noughts increased exponentially on the L.E.D. read-out.
"Here you are."
I accepted the calculator the way a communicant receives the host, and stared unseeingly at the flickering display.
"Would you like it gift wrapped?"
"Yes," I quavered, still recoiling from the total amount of money that I would have to pay. The tentativeness of my response was disregarded as the components were loaded into a very large box and beautifully wrapped. I stood there, frozen into immobility, silently observing the ritual which was being performed on my behalf. Sensing my continued presence, the gentleman inclined his head towards me and said,
"You pay at the desk."
Sentence had been passed and was about to be carried out! The salesman smiled at me benevolently (in lieu of the last cigarette before execution) and retrieved the calculator I was still cradling in my cupped hands. With a valedictory gesture reminiscent of the blessing given to a condemned man outside the gas chamber, he handed me the pay-in slip and resumed his packing. The wad of grubby banknotes was reluctantly forced back into my overstretched wallet and I meandered aimlessly around the shop, hoping that the Governor's reprieve would come through before my hard-earned lucre and I were forced to part company forever.
The shop had become a veritable hive of activity, teeming with a vast anonymous proletariat in search of either Cryptic Castration, the best-selling computer game recommended by the bi-weekly magazine Pervert Pleasures, or Domestic Violence in Ten Easy Lessons, a multi-media CD showing computer-generated assaults for trainee juvenile delinquents - a CD said to be sponsored by the Krakow Local Education Authority.
I use the term "a hive of activity” deliberately. Any witness to these goings-on would agree that the apian metaphor is not inappropriate. To the uneducated eye this strange bustling of customers to and fro, peculiar to Eastern European shops, uncannily resembles the uncoordinated gyrations of homecoming drones. In fact, these seemingly random movements constitute a highly organized series of migrations to/from one of three possible queues.
You’d think that fourteen years after flushing communism down the toilet of history, Polish retail outlets would finally dispense with the Soviet retail system and adopt a customer-friendly method of payment.
Chance would be a fine thing!
Here’s a shopping primer for those who’ve never ventured behind the former Iron Curtain:
Customers enter the store and immediately join:
Queue 1 - to the right of the counter. Upon reaching the head of the twenty-metre human tail-back, customers request and - if they're lucky - view the product/s in which they are interested (everything is on display behind the counter) and receive a pay-in slip for any item they wish to purchase. This is taken to
Queue 2 - in front of the cash desk where customers pay for said item/s and receive a torn-off section of the pay-in slip. This scrap of paper, duly stamped, serves as a cash receipt and is taken to
Queue 3 - to the left of the counter where the cash receipt is appropriated by the sales assistant and the item is (badly) wrapped and handed to the exhausted though triumphant customer.
(Every time a die-hard western Marxist feels the urge to expatiate on the joys of communism, they should be forced to spend one afternoon in Trehtar-Ag. I’m sure this would soon cure them of this strange affliction.)
My queuing itinerary was exactly as outlined above. Thus, I was now on my way to the cash desk queue, frantically trying to come up with a way of springing myself from death row. Ideas, unlike Trehtar-Ag customers, were few and far between.
Fifty minutes passed before I could even see the top of the cashier’s head. I’d had enough! It was time to cash in my chips and say ”Sod you!” to Trehtar-Ag and DVD players.
No sooner had I blurted out something about having to go to give myself an insulin injection (it was the best I could do under the circumstances) than the portly gentleman behind me (displaying a very pronounced brotherly affection for empty calories) made a sudden lurch for the cash desk, resulting in a corner of said desk making violent contact with my groin. Clutching my manhood in an excellent imitation of a Michael Jackson dance movement and mumbling Polish epithets in the most sotto of possible voces, I thrust my hand through the opening in the glass panel and prayed - in vain - for divine intervention.
Minor surgery was performed by the cashier to prise my fingers open and remove the wallet. The wad of Polish greenbacks was scooped out like a dollop of ice-cream and a chitty was thrust into my convalescing hand. A third Trehtar-Ag employee ushered me back to the oleaginous sales assistant who looked at me as though I were a rare specimen who might soon become extinct.
"The receipt!" he exclaimed, as if it were a cure for cancer. "We have the following, sir....” And he reeled off the list of all the items I had agreed to acquire for a Pharisee’s ransom. Having finished the list (which he read as if it were a Shakespearean soliloquy), he offered me another ingratiating smile. "You're all ready to begin, sir!"
I gave vent to a loud mutter of "We'll see," and staggered out of the shop with what seemed like half of the Forbin Project. As a throng of youngsters pushed past me through the marble portico, I turned to Dante's Inferno for a dire warning to those unsuspecting Trehtar-Ag victims: "Abandon hope all ye who enter here!"
The financial blow I received paled into insignificance compared with the physical and mental pain that was inflicted by my best friend (he’s a computer scientist) when he came to install this equipment. He was, euphemistically speaking, not exactly enamoured of the DVD I had bought. In fact, I'm sure he’d be more positively disposed towards an acute case of bubonic plague. He couldn’t believe that I’d spent good money on crap just about to be thrown away by most shops and replaced by up-to-date technology.
It turned out I’d bought an obsolete Bargain Basement DVD package that Britain had virtually given away to Polish dealers: it was cheaper for them to let Poles take this junk away with their own transport than for the Brits to pay a local waste disposal agency to ship it to the nearest rubbish tip!
Well, that’s the end of my nightmare. I hope that by narrating these events I’ll be able to exorcise these new demons. However, psychologists keeping stressing that we should be careful with such confessions, for as the Bard of Krakow eloquently puts it: ”Pissing in his shoes keeps no man warm for long.”
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