Curses!

So I’m on hold with a customer, and my cell rings. It’s my next-door neighbor, a health insurance broker who works out of his home office.

“You busy?”, he begins.
“On hold with a guy. What’s up?”
“Gotta tee time for Saturday. Not too early either.”
“Good. I’d like to sleep in for once---“

Before I can finish that sentence, my customer comes on to the line & immediately launches into a diatribe about having to accept returns from his customer because of the perceived salmonella scare, and not being able to say boo about it. I agree with his plight, and the dialogue gets animated & colorful, as it will with two guys who’ve known each other for 30 years discussing situations totally out of their control.

Within a minute or two, he’s gone, and I’m back to my neighbor, who has heard my side of the conversation with my client. He’s flabbergasted.

“What… can you…be thinking?”, he starts, dramatically.
“Excuse me?”
“You dropped the f-bomb on that guy!”
“I did? Oh, I guess I did. Hey, you should’ve heard him. But, Edwin Newman, I used it as an adjective. I didn’t call him one, which would be a noun, and counterproductive besides, even if it might be true.”
“Man, is my business different than yours or what?”

And it is. While the language and slang of the produce business overall has gentrified somewhat in the last few years, engaging in the lively art of conversation these days requires a lot of thought, and knowing to whom you’re speaking.

Sometimes I think my terminal market boys learned their craft from Andrew 'Dice' Clay, and in times of stress when talking to them (and we’ve had our fair share of them lately), I will confess that I occasionally retreat back to the pit curse-wise. My dad, a tomato broker from the 1950’s to his retirement in the late eighties, would not agree with my choice of words & wouldn’t have liked it one bit. I remember being totally amazed at his self-control when speaking to customers. Anger and the rare s-word were almost scripted, and always for a specific purpose.

With the young foodservice types nowadays, they come out of business school full of numbers, projections…and nice language. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but there will come a day, during a time of famine, pestilence or locusts. They will want very badly to curse out those locusts, and they will not be able to do so because their schooling told them not to.

That’s when they’ll explode into a million little pieces. I like my way better.

Later,

Jay