“Is This Fresh Eggs?”

As my faithful readers will recall, I was a somewhat diffident teenager. My father had taught me to be attentive to the point of obsequiousness, his theory being that one developed rapport with people and then you had a workable relationship. None of that worked all that well for me.

I was a chubby 13-year-old and bullied by my peers at least through 8th grade, so though I affected confidence, I was woefully unprepared to deal with bullies and everyone else. Honest to pete, in 7th grade, some guy cleared his throat and spat it on my hot dog. I didn’t retaliate.

So it was theoretically a terrible situation when I answered the phone at our house one day; this was in Ft. Lauderdale, where the odd transformation from old redneck south to mid-Atlantic accents had long since occurred. It used to be that from Orlando north, you may as well be in south Georgia; I don’t know whether the switch from Yankee accents takes place farther north now.

In any event, the phone rang, and I answered it. A voice said something in an urgent, questioning, unquestionably Yankee voice. I didn’t understand what he said; remember from earlier posts that though I’ve had my hearing tested repeatedly, no one can find a defect, but I still have little idea what anyone’s saying. In any event, I answered, “Yes.”

After he hung up, I realized that he had asked, “Fresh Eggs?” Back then we had phone books, and I looked them up; yes, Fresh Eggs was a farm in the western part of the county.

“Well, where was our egg delivery this morning! We didn’t get it, and now we’re short.” His accent was clipped, mean, New York/Jersey or possibly Philly.

“Um,” I answered.

“Look, I can’t operate this way! You say you’re going to deliver us eggs, you don’t fuck around, you get eggs here, you understand? What am I supposed to do without eggs? Huh?”

Here was the crucial moment: I should have said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t understand you at first. We are not a purveyor of eggs. You must have the wrong number.”

But some minor shift in my life had apparently just taken hold: I was not going to be indulgent of this fellow who must have misdialled in his anger and now was berating me for not having performed a task that not only had I not undertaken but was utterly incapable of, for many reasons, at least the most important of which was that I was not a chicken farm. Furthermore, I was frankly too scared at this point to back up and now admit that I had misheard him. How long would it have taken for him to understand my mistake? And how could I plausibly explain it except by being a little slow?

“Yessir,” I said, “I understand. I’m very sorry.”

“Well you oughta be! How can you run a business like that, huh? How do you keep customers?”

“I completely understand sir.” And for the life of me, I have no idea how I suddenly became so bold: “I’m not the boss, but I’ll definitely have a word with him about this. You can trust me.”

“OK,” he said, his voice falling from the tortured highest Jersey octave into a comfortable lower pitch. “You do that. So I get the usual order tomorrow?”

“Yes sir,” I said. And, in what now seems to me a prescient view of how I would like now to reform current customer service norms, which prescribe that the words “I’m sorry” never pass anyone’s lips, I said, “Again, sir, I apologize. Abjectly.” I thought that was pretty good for someone so young.

“OK.” And he got feisty again: “I trust you’ll get it right from now on.”

“Absolutely, sir.”

And thus we hung up, now best friends.

I don’t have any specific memory of the time of year, but it must have been summer, as I was alone at home the next day. The phone rang, and I ran to pick it up.

“Fresh Eggs?” the same voice screamed at me. “What the fuck are you doing? We didn’t get our shipment today! I called you yesterday, and you said...”.

“Whoa, hold on,” I interrupted in a firm voice, trying out an octave below yesterday’s tenor. “Who are you and why are you yelling at me?”

“Well,” he started, his voice a little more civil, “didn’t I call you people yesterday and complain about how you didn’t make our egg delivery?”

“Not me,” I said. “You may have spoken to the person who sells you eggs, but that wasn’t me.”

“Oh,” he said, confused and uneasy. Only years later did I realize that he must have recognized my voice and wondered if I wasn’t indeed the guy he intimidated yesterday. So, if his wits were quick, he must have wondered who was this suddenly annoyed person was, if not the person he spoke to yesterday? He wasn’t quick enough, apparently, to see through my ruse.

“Yeah,” I went on, emboldened, somehow. “You might make sure you know whom you’re talking to before you start yelling at someone.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I must have called the wrong number.”

“You sure did,” I said, as indignant as anyone wrongfully wronged could be. “Please be more careful in future.”

“I will, sorry,” he said again. “Goodbye.”

We hung up. I never heard from him again. I wonder if he ran a high-class restaurant high up in a tower on the Ft. Lauderdale waterfront or a low-slung dirty diner on Broward Boulevard five miles from the beach. And I reverted to being a diffident, scared, self-conscious teenager. Though in the end that wasn’t a very nice trick to play on anyone, especially a restaurant that relied on its daily shipment of eggs, it wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever done. Anyway, that kid, in that moment, was more the impish rebel than he grew up to be.