A Grumpy Old Man

Dana Carvey used to appear on the “Weekend Update” segment of Saturday Night Live as a character called “Grumpy Old Man.”  Grumpy would begin each of his comically cranky commentaries with “I’m old, and I’m not happy.  I don’t like things now, compared to the way they used to be.”  He’d then give a few examples of “progress” (movies, Kleenex, ATM machines, bottled water, etc.), accompanying each example with a ridiculous story of how they handled life without those things “back in my day” – usually by substituting the not-yet-invented “progress” item with something else, something archaic.  And he’d punctuate his commentaries with the occasional “That was the way it was, and we liked it!”  (One example: “Back in my day, we didn’t have Kleenex.  When you turned 17, you were given the Family Handkerchief.  It was brown and crusty and full of disease, and it stood on its own!  But that was the way it was, and we liked it!  We loved it!”) 

I once met a real Grumpy Old Man who could’ve given Carvey’s fictional one a run for his money.  I was working at a small Radio Shack in a strip mall at the time, and was often the only employee in the store.  (The only employees were me and the manager, and he needed his time off the same as anyone.)  One morning I arrived at work and proceeded to replace some burned-out ceiling lights before opening the store.  As I was changing the lights, from atop a ladder, I noticed an old man come to the front door and pull on the handle a few times.  The door was locked.  We weren’t open yet.  I ignored the old man and continued my work as he shuffled away.  Ten or twenty minutes later, after I put the ladder away and had opened the store for business, the old man returned.  “Good morning, sir!  Can I help you?”  I was all chipper, but he wasn’t.

“Yeah, you can help me!  I was here goddamn earlier!  You were on that goddamn ladder; wouldn’t open the goddamn door for me!”  I swear: his exact words. 

“Well, I’m sorry, sir.  We weren’t open yet; we open at ten.  Can I help you now?”  I was still playing Mr. Friendly Retailer to his Angry Customer.

“I need a goddamn part.  Show me a goddamn catalog, I’ll show ya the goddamn part I need!”  I put a Radio Shack catalog on the counter and he opened it to the parts section.  He proceeded to tell me about the little project he was undertaking at home, putting the word “goddamn” before every noun he spoke.  I’m not exaggerating his angry grumpitude. I immediately thought of his similarity to Carvey’s Grumpy Old Man character on SNL.  

When I started at Radio Shack, I knew nothing about electrical parts and such, but over the course of a year I became an expert.  The part which Grumpy pointed to in the RS catalog was the incorrect part for the task he described, and I told him so.  “That’s you not the right part.  You don’t need one of those; you need one of these.”

He lost it.  “Don’t tell me what I goddamn need!  You think I don’t know what goddamn part I need?!  I worked for Ma Bell before I retired; I put a whole goddamn phone company together and took it apart again!”  (Exact words.)

I played Diplomat, gently suggesting that I still believed he had the wrong part, yet retrieving and selling him the wrong part anyway, because he insisted.  He was still harrumphing through the entire check-out process, when – apropos of nothing – he added, “Back in 1965, I lost my brother to a John Deere tractor.”

The whole interaction with Grumpy had already been so dramatically confrontational and uncomfortable, and then this.  Such a non-sequitur, and such a bizarre thing to say to a stranger; was he putting me on this whole time to get a reaction from me?  Again I thought of Carvey’s character.  I wanted to laugh but stifled myself; if the thing about his brother was true, it wouldn’t be polite to laugh… but he caught me smirking.  “You think that’s funny?!”   

I apologized.  Grumpy harrumphed and said “goddamn” a few more times before leaving.  This happened about 24 years ago, so he’s most likely dead by now, gone to join his brother, run over by that tractor in ‘65.  When I think of Carvey’s SNL character, I always think of my meeting with the real Grumpy Old Man.  Such an angry crankpot!