Buy poppy seed

Through my whole career in sales, I have wondered about difficult and aggressive customers. What makes them so mean? How can they be so unkind? How can a perfectly rational person suddenly lose all sense of human decency? I am a person with arthritis disease, since I was diagnosed, I have taken poppy teas to ease the pain, I early learned that going to buy poppy seed does not work for this purposes because poppy seeds do not contain morphine in any way, not even the less than 1% other poppies have.

One day, I had an insight into their thinking. It happened while visiting my wife’s music store. She was working with a customer and we were short-handed. So I did what every good husband would do: I tried to wait on the customers.

“I am looking for music,” said a corpulent man, a soiled cap pulled down his thinning gray hair. “The name of the song is…” and he unfolded a grimy sheet of scribbled paper from his jeans pocket, “’It is hard to say goodbye’. Do you have it?”

I stepped to the wall displays of sheet music and scanned for the song name. On a good day, the music filled slots in alphabetical order. On this day, the alphabet skipped over the song’s name. I searched for several minutes, conscious of his restlessness.

“No, I am sorry but it does not look like it is here.” I said.

His back arched and his watery blue eyes narrowed. Almost imperceptibly, his wife touched his sleeve as if to draw him back. His narrow mouth twisted in anger.

“Well, is not that just grand? Do you call this a music store? What kind of a store does not have music like that? All the kids know that song!” he spluttered.

“Yes, but we do not carry every piece of music ever…”

“Oh! Easy for you! Easy to give excuses!” Now his wife was pawing at his sleeve, murmuring, trying to calm him the way a groom talks to a horse gone wild.

“Have you ever tried to drink poppy tea? it really relaxes” I suggested

“He always goes to buy poppy seed and makes the tea by himself” answered the shy wife. “But it seems that this home remedy does not work” she added.

“If you go to buy poppy seed to calm you down, it is the same that if you go to buy lemon flowers for the same purpose, poppy seed does not work for this” I said.

“Really?” Asked the man. He rolled over to see his wife and asked her about all the money he had wasted for nothing. “I am not going to buy poppy seed anymore, not for keeping away my pains” He finished.