Author: sauldraws

The oth­er day I stopped in a ‘fan­cy-pants-bed’ place that fea­tures beds with air blad­ders in them so you can make the bed as soft or as hard as you like, the left and right side are adjustable inde­pen­dent­ly, so you needn’t suf­fer through the ‘goldilocks’ syn­drome just because of your bed­mates pref­er­ence.

I laid myself out on this bed picked up the remote con­trol and start­ed push­ing away…25 – 35-45 — all seemed the same to me — 50 – 55-60 – 65 okay now we’re cook­ing, the bed seems kin­da firmer, hard even, so the sales­man comes over “blah, blah, blah…digital…normal people’s sleep num­ber is usu­al­ly between 15 & 35…blah, blah, blah”

I swear I did a spit-take, nor­mal peo­ple?, I let the ques­tion hang there, “ya know, ever day folks, they’re usu­al­ly between 15 & 35”, I glanced at the con­troller in my hand that read 72, if you were to base my nor­mal­i­ty pure­ly on my sleep num­ber I’m a lit­tle over twice as not nor­mal as those oth­er folks…

As much as I love num­bers, I think using num­bers in this instance is rather unimag­i­na­tive — why not use metaphor­ic sym­bols?

Hi my Name is Bill.. I’m a con­struc­tion work­er by day and a pro­fes­sion­al don­key wrestler at night..and everynight I sleep on a mat­tress as soft as a lambs behind.

I think that’s an improvement..don’t you?, and why 1 through 100, it only felt like there might have been 5 dif­fer­ent per­ceiv­able set­tings; painful­ly soft, too soft, uncom­fort­able, not hard enough and too hard, but then again, I’m not nor­mal.

Yesterday for lunch I stopped at a local piz­za joint for a cou­ple of slices and a diet cola, I bought 3 slices, and told the guy that he need’nt heat them up, because I wasn’t going to eat them for ‘hours’, he put them on a paper plate and asked me…

“you need a bag?,” now there was no snap­py retort, or abu­sive con­ver­sa­tion I stop in this place fair­ly often and any form of abuse is just going to yield me sali­va on my edibles..so i chilled, at least ver­bal­ly, I stared at him and ner­vous­ly smiled, hadn’t I said I wasn’t eat­ing them for hours? did he hon­est­ly think I was going to walk around with loose cold piz­za on a ‘less than qual­i­ty paper plate’, The whole exchange up to this point was very awk­ward, but wait..it got bet­ter.

so I got my bag ‘o slices and my cup­p-a-­coke, and he rang me up, my total was $6.35, I tossed out a tenspot and he sweati­ly hand­ed me my change, 4 bucks??? whatthe­duece? so being me I ques­tioned it.

S: “You gave me the wrong change…”
Piz­za: “I smoothed down”
S: “smoothed?”
S: So you smoothed away 25 cents off my bill?
Piz­za: yeah, makes the change eas­i­er.
S: I see… okay, lat­er [and I head­ed towards the door ]

S: Say, just out of curiosity how many slices do you thing ya’ll sell in a day?
Piz­za: We go through about 50 — 70 slice pie’s a day on the week­days, and prob­a­bly twice that on a Sat­ur­day or a Sun­day.
S: Wow that’s a lot of pizza’s. [and I left]

So the geek in me has to do the Math, lets assume that Piz­za dude ‘Smooths’ away any change under 50 cents, lets start with a week­day.

Monday’s Slice Sales: 70 piz­za pies x 8 slices = 560 slices;
Monday’s Slice Rev­enue: 560 slices x $1.75 = 980 bucks [poten­tial­ly at least]

To ful­ly com­pre­hend the impact of ‘Piz­za Smooth­ing’ we need to make an addi­tion­al assump­tion, the aver­age slice buy­er is buy­ing 2 slices and a small cola for a bill of $4.35

Monday’s Slice Sales Quan­ti­ty: 560 slices ÷ 2 = 280 sales
Monday’s Adjust­ed Slice Rev­enue: 280 x $4.35 = $1218.00

Still no change, so per­haps Pizza’s method­ol­o­gy is sound?… not hard­ly, we have to look at the impact on indi­vid­ual sales, remem­ber based on our orig­i­nal con­cept he ‘smooths’ away all change under 50 cents.

Monday’s Smooth­ing Loss­es: 280 x $0.35 = $98.00
Week­ly Loss­es: $98.00 x 5 + (​$98.00 x 4) = $882.00

Now I’m not an eco­nom­ics expert, but giv­ing away almost 900 bucks of rev­enue is prob­a­bly an eco­nom­ic no-no. If you think of it in Piz­za terms it’s like giv­ing away 504 slices of piz­za for free.

They could elim­i­nate ‘Smooth­ing’ cut the slice prices by 60% and still increase prof­it, AND they’d have the bestest + cheap­est piz­za in town.

And to think, my high school math teacher thought I was sleep­ing

So the local police here in sub­ur­bia have no sense of humor, zero, zilch, nada. It’s about 3 a.m. and I find myself at Wawa, des­per­ate­ly in need of caf­feine, I sweep in, hit the ATM, grab 2 one liter Diet Cokes and 2 SFRBs and a Pan­tone 388 apple, that’s bright green, if your swatch book isn’t handy. Just as I was grab­bing the apple, ‘I feel good’ by James Brown start­ed play­ing over the Wawa sound sys­tem, now it’s 3 a.m. 90% of the world may be tired, but I just woke up, so I couldn’t help myself, I began to dance, but not as I would dance, but as ‘JAMES’ would dance, up and down the aisles with my hand­ful of car­bon­at­ed jet fuel and my bright green apple, shuf­fling my feet, slid­ing up and down the aisles in my own lit­tle world. Which of course I wasn’t actu­al­ly in, no I was in a con­ve­nience store in the wee hours of the morn­ing, in the mid­dle of sub­ur­bia, danc­ing like in my mind James Brown.

I explained to the police­man, that I was just hap­py, and that I would go home and dance, he looked at me like I was the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of poor evil, some drug-crazed goa­tee wear­ing freak, so hopped up on goof-balls that I couldn’t con­tain my joy­ous feet long enough to get a bev­er­age. “Get on home, now son!” the nice offi­cer told me, “yes, sir!, going home sir!” in hind-sight, any attempt at humor with a law enforce­ment per­son, is a bad idea, “sor­ry I danced in pub­lic sir!, me and Kevin Bacon are going Home now, sir!”…why I chose to accen­tu­ate every state­ment with ‘SIR’ is beyond me, but I start­ed to gig­gle, I mean what he going to do ‘arrest me for danc­ing liked James, flash ahead to my arraign­ment

Bailiff read the charge..

“Saul was arrest­ed on the morn­ing of August 5th at a Wawa, where he was being funky as he wan­na be and he was also get­ting down with his bad self both pre­sum­ably with­out a license.”

[flash back to now] So this par­tic­u­lar cop wasn’t a huge ‘Foot­loose’ fan and he cracked nary a smile, but the guy behind the counter lost it, and began laugh­ing so hard I think he pulled a mus­cle, At this point the morn­ing could have gone in two dra­mat­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tions, one involv­ing bail mon­ey and a cav­i­ty search, the oth­er involv­ing my coke and blog­ging.

I must stop going to that Wawa.

I’m slow­ly turn­ing into Elvis, even though I’m aware of it, the process seems to be beyond my con­trol, the sim­i­lar­i­ties are, well …sim­i­lar;

Both Elvis and I are male, we both have side­burns (although difer­ent­ly styled), we both have weight issues and are fond of white vel­vet jump­suits and large dia­mond encrust­ed belts with our names on it.(although to be fair although mine does say ‘Elvis’, I don’t recall ever see­ing Elvis wear­ing a ‘Saul’ belt, but who knows real­ly, it may have been one of those things he did in the pri­va­cy of Grace­land).

I know what your think­ing, saul based on that pit­tance of sim­i­lar­i­ties, you could just be turn­ing into an Elvis imper­son­ator, and not actu­al­ly ‘The King’ him­self.. But wait, there’s more, Elvis was very fond of his mam­ma, and although I’ve nev­er actu­al­ly met Mrs. Pres­ley, I feel I too would be par­tial to her… Elvis breathed in oxy­gen, I also breath in oxy­gen (and obvi­ous­ly at a high­er fre­quen­cy than ‘cur­rent’ Elvis), we both exhale car­bon diox­ide.. Star­tling isn’t it…

The sim­i­lar­i­ties are far from over, lat­er in life Elvis con­sumed a steady diet of Val­i­um, Ethi­na­mate, Dilau­did, Demerol, Per­co­dan, Placidyl, Dexedrine, Biphet­a­mine, Amy­tal, Quaalude, Carbri­tal, Cocaine hydrochlo­ride and Rital­in. I LIVE right near a CVS Pharmacy..creepy huh.

I’m not real­ly sure when the trans­for­ma­tion will be com­plete… stay tuned…