I know it’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time before
the internets, when Lolcats were just cats and Amazon was just a river. In this
dawn of prehistory if you wanted to buy stuff you needed to actually go and get
it, or use nineteenth century snail mail technology to order stuff from a big
shiny book. Jack was the product of such a world. He filled the gap between
store and catalogue, travelling his patch introducing people to wonders not
available in either, as a commercial traveller.
Jack sold Widgets to industry, and as such his products were
in demand throughout the Midlands , from sea to
shining sea, as it were. He was a master of the highways and byways of
a huge swathe of territory. Of course all of this was a long time ago, shortly
after the demise of the mastodon I imagine. He’s certainly been retired almost
as long as I've been plying my trade, and let’s face it, my spring chicken days
are far behind me now.
And so it came to pass, a few weeks back, that Jack came to
see me, attended by what can only be described as a deputation of concerned
looking daughters. The poor chap looked a little sheepish as the
spokes-daughter recounted his recent adventure with an occasional embellishment
furnished by the other delegates. It appears Jack had decided to take a drive to
get his tea, fridge and larder being temporarily depleted. He hopped in the car
and headed for his nearest convenience store, but on arriving there realized
that it was half day closing and he would have to find an alternative vendor.
This fazed him a little, but he gamely soldiered on. After all,
the supermarket wasn't far off so it should be easy enough. The only thing was,
it was already dark, so landmarks were hard to find, and in a fog of twilight
and perhaps hypoglycaemia, suddenly Jack was transported back three decades and
was on the road plying his Widgety wares. So off he went, travelling the
highways and byways.
Some hours later the spokes-daughter arrived chez Jack to
find him and his car gone. The neighbours recalled seeing him go out late that afternoon and even that he had told them as he went that he was off to fetch
his tea. They’d thought no more about it, but now it did seem odd that he
hadn't made it back five or more hours after what should have been a twenty minute
round trip.
When they tried calling his mobile they could hear it
ringing in the house, as he hadn't thought to take it with him, and so after a
quick council of war with the rest of the family the police were called and
Jack was reported M.I.A. An hour or so later WPC Watmough contacted the by now
increasingly frantic family to say her colleagues in another county had Jack
safe and sound by the roadside. Thanks to a combination of number plate
recognition software and CCTV they had spent a happy time in traffic control
tracking Jack’s progress through every major conurbation in Borsetshire and the
neighbouring counties that had formed one of his sales rounds all those years
back. Of course in the meantime all the factories he had been selling to had
been pulled down and redeveloped into housing estates so he’d had no landmarks
to remind him where he was or what he was doing.
Sad to say this little escapade has highlighted the
increasing severity of Jack’s memory failure and he has had to hang up his car
keys for good, but at least the very technology that has all but done away with
his occupation served to track him down far quicker that we would have managed
in that far off web-free age.
