Many of you know this tale, but many of you do not. In the late 1990s I worked at a camera store in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina called Sunshine Cameras. The owner who was known for his "slick salesmanship" ordered some expired underwater disposable cameras. At first he was going to put them out without any warning, but I convinced him to let me take some shots with one in my parent's jacuzzi. So I visited a dollar beach shop on my way there, and purchased a rubber shark. The shots came out pretty good, and we sold 100s of them, so much so we ordered even more for the summer season. Then one day a gentleman came in, and started studying the images of the shark and proceeded to give us a lecture. The fellow was full of himself describing how the diver was in imminent danger of attack, and he could tell by the positioning of the fins, and the gills. Through it all we kept trying to interrupt him, but no such luck, he just kept babbling on and on. Finally we decided to force the issue, and clue the "sharkothologist" (there is no such thing as a "sharkothologist") in on what he was looking at, and pulled out the rubber shark. To his credit he finished his sentence while glaring at the shark. At that point he called us all a name, and ran! Hopefully for understandable reasons all of us, and a couple of other customers literally fell down laughing. Below there is a newly rescanned last surviving image of the rubber shark, and a photo of myself and the staff of Sunshine Cameras. On a sad note, I found out several years later that Billy Gowan (the person on the extreme right) committed "suicide by cop" to escape some personal issues.
I am on the far left.
Comments
Post a Comment