Welcome

Dennis Jones is a Jamaican-born international economist, who has lived most of the time in the UK and USA, and latterly in Guinea, west Africa. He moved back to the Caribbean in 2007. This blog contains his observations on life on this small eastern Caribbean island, as well as views on life and issues on a broader landscape, especially the Caribbean and Africa.

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Saturday, May 12, 2007

Knuckle headed?


Barbados has launched the National Initiative for Service Excellence (NISE) and it can't take hold fast enough as far as many people are concerned, myself included. I had another example of how badly it's needed when I went to buy bottled water at the SuperCentre, at Rendezvous, a few days ago. With nothing else in my shopping cart but the bottles, I see on the register "Pork knuckle". "What's that?" I asked the cashier. She acted surprised and looked around to see where the knuckle was, and nothing remotely like a piece from a pig, raw or cooked, could be seen anywhere. "Sorry. I'm tired." she eventually replied. I counted as far as 3 then replied: "If you're tired, tell your boss and ask to take a rest. Don't go charging people for things they are not buying." A supervisor came over and adjusted the register, I paid and without any more discussion, left. When I mentioned this to some friends later in the week, they all laughed. "You catch her! She wanted to knuckle you for her dinner to take home later." I could understand that possible explanation of a form of petty pilfering. But wouldn't a smart person have tried to hide that knuckle-headed trick on a bill that had a few more items on it than bottled water? Maybe she wasn't smart and that's the problem. Or her eye sight was bad. Or she was finding a way of coping with the high cost of living. If you don't laugh, you have to cry.

1 comment:

iqpLENS said...

Now that is some funny stuff. I use to work at SuperCenter (Oistins) when I was a kid.