ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

An older man, one of our regular customers, chatted with me as I completed the paperwork for his loan. He told me a short and humorous anecdote about when his sister had been a bank teller years ago, and had been present for a robbery. When the police asked her later what kind of gun the robber had had, she didn’t know. According to the man’s story, when they asked her how big the gun had been, she had stretched her arms out to about three feet to demonstrate. It wasn’t a terrible little story in person, and I commented afterward that I’m grateful for the bulletproof glass our stores have. The summer of 2004 was a bad one for bank robberies in the Kansas City area, with sometimes two a week, and I remarked on this.

“I know,” he said sadly. “And it’s not going to get any better, either.”

I had no opinion either way, so I agreed noncommittally.

“But I’m prepared,” he said confidentially. “I’ll be totally truthful with you, I’ve been stockpiling food for two years now,” he said.

I looked at him quizzically, trying to determine the relationship between these two statements. “That’s a good idea,” I said finally.

“Canned goods last a long time,” he told me.

Right, you enjoy your botulism, old man, I didn’t say to him. “They do,” I said instead.

My boss was laughing and laughing in the back of the store.