The reach-me-down Renault my boss had bought from one of his subordinates in our company would meet the road once a month. Boss at the wheel and his only son pushing it from behind, the rattletrap would roll out and stop outside the gate. Revving the engine for a while to warm up, the boss would send a word to some of his subordinates in the next street that they could go accompany him to the departmental canteen if desired. Soon some of them would be in the backseat for a drive to the canteen.
Clad in jeans, t-shirt and a beret on his bald pate the boss would set out for the canteen with his colleagues. His intent of carrying them to the canteen was not—hold your breath—letting them ride his car but to push it wherever it conked out enroute, and mostly it would. With a long list of items for purchase the man of 55 winters would majestically step into the canteen. The manager would summon one of the gullible salesmen and tell him, “Show the items to the boss and place them in his car’s dicky (a word often used by buyers and sellers in such canteens to mean the boot of the car).”
Only after taking a bird’s-eye view of all the articles on the racks the gaffer would start his spree of asking about their quality and price. “Hey! What is that in blue-and-white shade jutting out of the rack there?” he would ask pointing to something. Before the pitiable salesman could come out with his prompt reply the eyeballs of the pseudo-buyer would shift to another article on the rack. “Could you please pass on that?... No, no not that, the one on the left a tad above your noggin, over there,” pointing at something bulky.
Soon the hapless salesman would hand the stuff to the geezer who would lift it and turn it from side to side remarking, “Oh, damn dear and unwieldy it is,” looking at its price and return it. This drill of querying about almost every article on the racks would eventually narrow down to the purchase of a cake of bathing soap or a toothbrush. Those who had accompanied him to the canteen would have by then bought their items and become cheesed off by their long wait for their homeward trip.
For the host of queries about a spectrum of articles in the canteen the pretentious buyer would have refuelled his car with at least ten litres of petrol besides getting his gullible neighbours done in with a Kafkaesque wait for him in the canteen and doing a paltry purchase of a cheap item up for grabs in his neighbourhood itself.