Waiting around to get a pair of glasses. There were three different women working in the shop, but I kept thinking it was the same one, a woman in a labcoat with fantastically bad short-term memory.

“Can I help you?”

“I ... thought we'd already discussed this?”

I've noticed that people who work in a place often start to look alike. Employment itself probably does that to people. They share a routine and a concern, an ethos, and pretty soon they're at a monstrous rally, screaming and trying to get a good look at the supreme leader.

After a while I was able to distinguish the three. One was evidently the senior employee, and she seemed dissatisfied with the job. Here she was, working in a mall and wishing it a boutique full of smart-lookng customers, not feckless dopes with broken glasses. All around there were posters of Eurodrones wearing the latest lensless frames, sweaters tied around their necks, muttering to themselves: was it at Friedrichsbad? Or was it Marienbad? And the frames, who wears them?

“Do you sell men's frames?”

“That's the men's section you're looking at.”

“Oh. Well. Do you have a heterosexual section? Oh, forget it, these'll do. I'm auditioning for a role as a deranged gunman on a rooftop.”