Boy,” asked the breadman as he entered the general store with an armload of hard rolls and family-sized loaves of whole wheat, “have you guys been following the various TV and newspaper stories about the decline of spelling ability in the country?”
“No,” replied the man who was delivering gasoline as he sat eating a Moonpie dipped in coffee from the communal pot, “but I actually graduated from high school and went on the a community college and only have this job because my company downsized a lot of workers in the computer department, none of them having to do with spelling, and most of our jobs were outsourced to India.”
He paused to move old newspapers that crowded the radiator in the front window and sat down while he flipped through a pile of credit card receipts with the same flair that a Las Vegas gambler would approach a deck of blackjack cards.
“Yep,” said the line installer for the folks looking to replace disc TV with various receptions using phone lines, “I never knew that anybody cared much for spelling these days.”
“For your information,” piped up the Curmudgeon, “I’m one of the few residents who noticed when signs were spelled wrong at intersections that time when the ambulance painter got hired at the county maintenance shop.”
“What signs were spelled wrong,” asked bread, gasoline, and TV in unison?
“Why the stop signs, of course,” said the curmudgeon. “I just got my new Ford pick-up — that mighty nice red one that lasted me from 1972 up to last year — anyway I was dricing along to the four corners to pick up some bailing wire from the store over there since he didn’t have none here, and I came to the sign that’s been there since the late 60’s and it said “POTS in big white letters.
“POTS?” his audience asked.
“POTS,” he answered, “and not only there but the sign at Wiggley’s Road where it runs into Nittling’s Road, and the one at County Road 118 when it hits the never-to-be-finished Interstate. Every one of the signs that once read STOP now read POTS.
“Why?” they all asked.
“Seems the county hired a guy who worked in the city painting those ambulance fronts; he’s been painting ECNALUBMA for so long I guess he thought it was the correct way to spell the rest of the road signs. The only signs he had an easy time with were the railroads ‘cause RR backwards is still RR.
“LLIH PEETS, RAEG WOL were toughies for him. And if I hadn’t gone over to the town barn and told them all, they’d still be wrong today. So don’t say I don’t know how to spell or know the finer points for those foreign codes.”
“Foreign codes?” they asked.
“Yeh, the words that TV newsmen use, like ‘sagging economy.’ Any dummy knows that sag spelled backwards is gas and that’s a big problem with this economy.”
“Do you believe it?” asked the breadman.
“Some days I do,” said TV.
“You better,” said the curmudgeon.