On trying to be a smartarse....

Some people are not cut out to perform practical jokes, I am one of them.

 My Father, the inspiration behind my latest escapade, on the other hand is a master at it. From hiding in the airing cupboard when my sister and I were children - we had been really naughty and were not taking discipline at all seriously so he said he would flush himself down the toilet. We got hysterical until we found him twenty minutes later on a shelf in the cupboard. (No, he is not a dwarf but he is the reason I am traumatised by them!) - To putting small light bulbs up his nose and pretending he had sneezed. Hiding in the ivy by the kitchen window was a great favourite, this works especially well if you have eyes that get wider like Gonzo on the Muppet Show and a handy bare bit off window through which you can protrude those eyes at your rowing daughters fighting over the washing up. Oh and enough patience to wait until they turn round and see you, resulting in much broken crockery and screaming.
A lifetime of being leapt out at and quizzed by lateral thinking games, luckily has not left either one of us a gibbering wreck but we are prone to pushing people inside duvet covers  and thinking this is hilarious.
So when I discovered, on the one weekend I had my parents round for Sunday lunch, my father had escaped  I was thinking to find a picture of him ( another great favourite- slipping small passport sized photos of himself into the corner of picture frames, that don't get discovered for ages) but no. That night, after I had steamed up the bathroom having a shower, a message appeared on the mirror in the steam. From it's content I can only assume it was meant for my son, anyway it got me thinking, how very clever......hmmm...

Maybe I would get Miss Pankhurst back for her recent indiscretion. She had bought dried cherries and put them in the drawer at work, maliciously leading me into thinking there was something sweet behind there and when I stole one, it was no pleasure at all because it tasted like dehydrated rabbit pooh!

So I concocted a cunning plan. Only, there is no steam in work and when you run back and forth breathing on the makeup mirror it un-steams just as quickly. Apart from looking like a retriever with asthma, I also banged my nose on the mirror thus changing the message and had to explain my behaviour to a bemused floor manager.

That shall be filed away along with the time I thought I heard 'She Who Must Be Obeyed'  and Miss Marple in the service lift, so I stuck a carrier bag on my head and did a tap dance when the doors opened, only to see a lift full of unamused fashion staff who stayed there for a full thirty seconds until the doors closed.

Chaos at the tills!!!!

Sometimes the Hall of Plenty is awash with utter chaos. Like yesterday....

Watching Dippy Peacock struggle with a bunch of metallic balloons shaped as lips was a guilty pleasure for us all. Like an extremely camp version of the balloon seller in Mary Poppins, the poor lamb had to attach them to his display stand and was only saved from drifting three floors to ladies wear by the timely intervention of a colleague.

Somebody on one of the counters perforated their own eardrum with a cotton bud in a freak accident that even I, with my varied imagination, cannot quite comprehend. Apparently, she had it in her hand as she emptied a bin bag and it managed to go down her ear canal as she stood back up.....?

 What are the chances of that happening, like EVER?

Slipper Mouth managed to insult one of the new consultants in a gaffe I have yet to get to the bottom of.

A woman tried to bring back an eye pencil to us that had clearly been used, I could kind of tell by the way it had no point and a cat hair stuck to it, but she insisted that it hadn't. Even if I was to believe her, the fact that she was wearing it as she was talking to Miss Marple and I made me just a tiny bit Captain Peacock and we sent her away.

A rambling idiot entertained (frightened) us all for a brief while at lunch time. She was beeping and walking backwards, staring at people then smiling for longer than was strictly necessary. Yes, she may have been autistic but from the size of her pupils I think it was more chemical than genetic.

 And where were security at this time?
They were pushing water bottles stuck on a stick to customers trapped for forty minutes in one of the lifts!

Our till then decided to act like something from Poltergeist by randomly displaying the number 2 over and over again until it gave up and crashed, and two customers wanted to try on lipsticks at five minutes to closing, then complained because we hurried them even though the store was closed.

After being trapped behind the counter by an overexcited Twiddle Blink,  who wanted to check she still had an appointment for her prom and cross questioned me about who was going to do her make up, and having bronzer shoved in my face by a woman with a silly high pitched voice, I was ready to lie down on the floor and just wait till Monday.

It has been known for the cleaners to discover the dried out carcasses of Consultants that have crawled under the counters to die.