Exercises
“Being an igloo salesman was getting Laszlo down.”
Being an igloo salesman was getting Lazlo down. It wasn’t the terrible weather conditions, though the constant dark made reading the brochures difficult. Nor was it the turnover, which was pretty slim at the moment; sales were right down. No, the thing that Lazlo was finding harder and harder to cope with was the weight. Sometimes he had three stops in one day and there was always the chance that he’d have a buyer at each one. So he had to take enough igloos with him just in case. At first he’d revelled in the new-found muscle tone carrying an igloo across a glacier had given him, and the admiring glances he’d drawn in the evenings at the pub. But slowly, as the winter wore on, and his enthusiasm waned, it was all he could do to strap them on his back each morning.
by Pil Lee
Being an igloo salesman was getting Laszlo down. Despite the glossy brochures and an unbeatable smile he was just having to face the fact that out here on the edge of the Sahara he was pretty much in a no-win situation.
In fact, thinking back on it he found it hard to remember exactly how he’d scored this job. He had a foggy notion that maybe it involved a lot of alcohol and some significant bragging one Friday night in the pub.
He trudged up to another tent.
“Where do you knock on these damn things?” he thought, not for the first time.
by Peter Miller
Being an Igloo salesman was getting Lazlo down. Why a Hungarian was trying to sell Igloos in Buenos Aires was a question he didn’t want to stop and answer.
Another four days, he thought, until the new Summer stock arrives and I still have two weeks of standing stock from last year’s Winter collection. He’d done the courses, he knew he shouldn’t whinge. Whinging is so twentieth century and this new millenium is all about survivors, he’d been told.
But still, as he sat in the gutter watching the water drip out of the back of the failed refrigeration unit on his van, he had to ask the big questions.
Perhaps this was it. Perhaps his life ended here in the gutter drowned in his own tears and unreturnable stock.
Just then his beeper sounded and he flicked it into his hands to read the words:
Need Love? Ring 07328548 now!
He grabbed his mobile in time to read the message ‘battery low’, before it snicked off with a beep.
by Simon von Wolkenstein
‘Tooth.’
“At last, a clue!” thought Wendy, extracting a tooth from the pile carpet. Funny that she’d not noticed it before, since it was well over a foot in length.
But hey, it was a deep pile.
Evidently the milkman’s story was plausible after all. Suddenly the image of a tyrannosaur eating Mr Pearson didn’t seem quite so amusing.
It was hard to believe, then, that there was only one witness. People weren’t talking for a reason. It could mean only one thing: the Mob was involved.
This genetic engineering caper was getting well and truly out of hand.