Soup Nazi

I’ve always had fantasies about being a fishmonger or a vegetable seller. I always thought that it’d be great, being like a soup Nazi, drunk on power, ordering his grovelling customers around.

Naturally when somebody asked me to volunteer to distribute goodie bags for some charity run it’s a great chance for me to fulfil my most deeply cherished soup Nazi fantasies.

Best still was that they issued light blue T-shirts for us to wear. For those of us who watch edutainment TV we know that that’s the colour of UN food distributors. Lagi best that we get to play UN aid workers. Such great fun.

We were joking about whether there were small arms or cattle prods we could use to keep demanding customers in line. I kinda liked that “gimme the form, here’s yr bag, that’s what you want?” routine.

Then there’d be some irritating customers who would ask all manner of questions over a simple shirt. Why are you so eager to get your money's worth from a charity organisation? Of course I can sympatise if you want a shirt that fits. (I was instructed: give them exactly the size of shirt they declared, no more.) But I saw people change their mind and it's not their fault if they made a mistake without knowing the size of the shirt. Of course the latecomers had to get the wrong size of shirt, that couldn't be helped. Ah well. It was plenty of fun going to the backroom and saying, "we need 3 more pallets of goodie bags. Fill them up, SLAVE!". And watching the regular staff blanch.

Anyway I've also decided to go do that stanchart half marathon at the end of this year. Now there are people who will go for every running event regardless, but I will probably only go for it once. I might decide to go for a full marathon next year, but either I will do that, or I will quit. Or I might fail to run the half marathon and decide to go again next year. I want to be like Andre Agassi. He didn't win stuff every year, but he won all the grand slams once. He won stuff when he was young, and then won stuff when he was old.

The first (and only time) I saw a marathon live, incidently was when I went to Boston and stayed at a friend's place. I woke up on Sunday morning and there were many people on the streets. It was an exciting time. Sorda.