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Fame
I Made Steve Carell Laugh
Or at least maybe a low chuckle. It was definitely a smile. I’m sure of that.
I took a part-time job at an Apple Store a while back, intending to work there a few years while I slowly closed up my business. As it happened, I closed up my business earlier than expected and I enjoyed the Apple job. That became full time and I stayed there, selling iPhones and iPads and everything else for four years. I enjoyed the work and was good at it.
Located in Hingham, MA, the store gets a fair number of celebrities, mostly local sports figures. Other employees would sometimes whisper “Look, it’s David Ortiz” or something like that. Actually, I don’t know if it ever was David Ortiz. I don’t follow sports and wouldn’t know David Ortiz from Dave Chappelle. Chappelle is taller, right?
My ignorance is so great that I easily could have waited on a famous sportsperson and never known it. They’d have to be very famous for me to recognize their name and I’d never know them by face. Our queue listed waiting customers by first name only, so I would have walked up and said “Hi, Tom, I’m Tony. What brings you in today?” to anyone named Tom.
If I did help some sports legend, I’m unaware of it. If I ever did, I wonder if they were surprised by my not recognizing them or just relieved to be able to buy something without the salesperson nervously chattering, gushing, and blushing.
Steve Tyler dropped in now and then, and I did recognize him. He is hard to miss. I never waited on him, but I did snap a picture of his dogs. He is in the picture too, though accidentally. I wouldn’t think to deliberately take a picture of anyone.
His dogs got more attention than he did as the employees at the store loved dogs. Anybody’s dogs. I joked that if you wanted to rob the store, you would only need two accomplices with cute dogs. Most of the employees would be on the floor playing with the dogs and the rest would be snapping pictures while you walked out with whatever you wanted.
Okay, maybe not quite that bad. But close, very close.
Steve Carell also visited us. His first name came up in the queue and I walked to where it said he would be. He was standing…
