Opinion: Here’s a story of unbridled audacity that I heard at a Christmas open house party…
It’s table games season.
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Somewhere between the setting the table and clearing the dishes, these pursuits have a way of surfacing. Trivia. Lore. Shaggy dog stories. “Dad” jokes. Anecdotes from the family archive.
Not much rivals the fun of puzzles, sharing little known facts, along with grandma’s “back in my day” stories. But here’s an amusing addition for your consideration. One that’s sure to, if nothing else, elevate the decibel level at the table. Life being what it is, it’s a game that just about everyone can play, however, the seniors at the table will have a distinct advantage.
The best label for this game is Unmitigated Gall.
To get you started, here’s a story of unbridled audacity that I heard at a Christmas open house party just last Saturday. If the category had its own award show, I think this one might be taking home the Oscar equivalent.
Somehow the subject of garage sales had come up. I think we were talking about the flotsam and jetsam that family life generates and how this eventually necessitates the dreaded, but necessary garage sale.
We’ll call the hostess Katrina as a courtesy to the offender who just might otherwise have been identifiable. Katrina was talking about a clock she had sold in a garage sale several years ago. It might have qualified as a surplus clock in their home, but it was a perfectly good clock. Now, Katrina is a straight-shooter, an ideal neighbour. She would be the last one to foist junk on anyone. So, there she was, along with her kids, manning the tables one Sunday afternoon. Frisbees, frying pans, Furbies — everything must go! An acquaintance from the neighbourhood happens by. She expresses interest in the clock. Katrina dutifully demonstrates that the clock is still in good working order. Tick, tock, tick, tock; ring goes the alarm. Ta-da! A princely sum of two dollars is transferred to Katrina and the neighbour leaves with her bargain.
Fast forward two years. Katrina is outside, working in the garden. The neighbour passes by. She asks if she remembers her. Ever sociable, Katrina smiles and nods. Of course, she remembers! She knows the name, as well. After all, they live just around the corner from each other.
Good, the neighbour replies. So, you remember the clock you sold me? Of course, she remembers the clock. Well, it didn’t work, comes the reply.
Even now, years later, Katrina is aghast at this remark.
“No, no”, she protests. “Don’t you remember? I plugged it in and showed you that it was in perfect working order. We tested it.”
“No, it didn’t work,” comes the frosty reply. “I’d like my money back.”
With that, the neighbour produces the clock.
Katrina takes a moment as gravity is repealed and the air around her solidifies.
She takes a moment to compose herself. Her response is simple, straight forward and regal: “Of course.”
She goes inside to retrieve a toonie.
She places the toonie in the neighbour’s hand.
Katrina is more than the soul of customer service. She is the soul of diplomacy and statesmanship. She does all this with a smile.
Several years and homes ago, my sister arrived home unexpectedly early from a holiday. From inside the house, she could hear water running. She searched until she found her hose was turned on full blast. In her absence, the next-door neighbours were filling their swimming pool.
She turned off the water supply and never mentioned it to them. But oh, she was wiser.
So, there you have it: two stellar examples of unmitigated gall. Can you top these? Can you?
Get ready, get set … go.
This week’s question for readers:
Question: What are your run-ins with unmitigated gall? How did you deal with it?
Last week’s question for readers:
Question: Are you a stockpile of trivia? Share some your arcane knowledge here.
• After actress Jayne Mansfield met her untimely death, crashing into the rear of a semi-truck trailer, a safety bar at the back of trailers was mandated. It is called a Mansfield Bar. Because of my name, I frequently share this trivia at parties.
Jan Mansfield
• My late wife always said I was a cornucopia of useless information. I know why Archimedes said “Eureka”. I Know it was Neville Chamberlain who said “Peace in our time.” I know what Rosa Parks did, and who said “Just watch me.” Why do my friends not care?
Bruce Jamieson
• On a tour (highly recommended) of the Wedgwood factory near Stoke-on-Trent in England, we learned that the word “biscuit” comes from the old French word “bescuit”, in turn derived from the Latin words bis (twice) and coctus (cooked). Biscuits were first baked and then dried out in a slow oven (i.e. “twice-cooked”). Irrelevant here, but the tour can be followed by a delicious “high tea”.
Angela Dawson
• When I worked as a checkstand grocery cashier, I learned the facts about every Canadian coin and bill that probably seem irrelevant to most people, such as:
— The beaver on the 5-cent coin was modelled after a beaver found in eastern Canada, Ontario if I remember correctly.
— The boat on the 10-cent coin was the Bluenose, which was one of the last Canadian schooners that were both fast and famous in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia.
— The animal on the quarter is a caribou, not a deer, which is also a member of the reindeer family (Rudolph being one who hails from Lapland in Northern Finland), and caribou are a meat and fur staple for the Inuit.
— The loonie bird on the one-dollar coin was taken from a sketch in the wild, but the polar bear on the two-dollar coin was modelled after a polar bear that lived in captivity after being found as an orphan cub in Churchill, Manitoba.
— The woman on the 10-dollar bill is Viola Desmond, a black Canadian woman who won a discrimination lawsuit when she was arrested for sitting in a “whites only” section of a Nova Scotia movie theatre.
Leslie Benisz
• The Bounty set sail in 1787 for the South Pacific. Their assignment was to bring breadfruit back to the British West Indies to feed slaves in the British sugar cane fields. It was not considered important enough to send a captain of the line, so they sent Lieutenant William Bligh. When he was set adrift after the mutiny (without compass or sextant), he sailed 4,000 miles by using the sun and the stars as guidance and eventually found the safe harbour he was looking for. The British Admiralty were so impressed, they promoted him to captain after he returned to England. All the movies had it wrong.
John Ketteringham
• When my husband was a child in the 1940s, he lived a few blocks from the Hotel Vancouver where his father worked as the head bellman. At the time, the hotel was lit up at night manually and the lights could be seen from their apartment on Nelson Street. His bedtime coincided with the lights going on, and one night he refused to go to bed because someone had forgotten to turn the lights on. His mother phoned his father at the hotel to get the lights turned on so that my husband would go to bed.
Bernadette Chapman
• My current favourite bits of trivia are: The original Stanley Cup (there are three of them) was manufactured in Sheffield, Yorkshire — the city of my birth. And this tidbit: Only one current Vancouver Canuck was born in Canada (Noah Juulsen).
Janet Cowley
• My favourite tidbit of arcane knowledge (which I assume is true): When researchers prepared a recipe dating from Roman times, they found the finished dish to be unbearably salty. The reason: Rome’s lead-lined aqueducts caused lead poisoning, one of the symptoms of which is an inability to taste salt. A twist worthy of a historical mystery novel.
Adam Abrams
• Which American state capital has no letters in common with its state: Pierre, South Dakota. From a mid-’90s Will Shortz NPR stumper I had to write a computer program to solve: Which two American cities end with the two letters that are their respective state’s respective two-letter abbreviation? Albany, NY and Santa Monica, CA.
Eric Promislow
• This tidbit has won me a lot of drinks over the years. People never get it right. How often do penguins mate? The answer is: once a year.
B. Chen
• What is a group of hyenas called? A cackle.
D.B. Benson