Spero Consulting

Recently, we pur­chased two bot­tles of pome­gran­ate syrup. Usu­ally, we like pome­gran­ate syrup, and it is par­tic­u­larly good-​tasting when mixed with either club soda or vodka. (Friends and oth­ers with upcom­ing vis­its to world head­quar­ters: we prefer Stolichnaya.)

Any­way, we opened one bot­tle of the pome­gran­ate syrup, and it tasted bad — real bad. It’s dif­fi­cult to be more spe­cific than that, because it was, well, so utterly dis­gust­ing. We sus­pect that if Satan serves bev­er­ages in hell, they taste some­thing like the bad pome­gran­ate syrup that we had.

Tonight, we went to return the two bot­tles for a refund. At the counter there were two clerks: a cute, younger women and an older, less pleas­ant one. For­tu­nately, we drew the cute, young one. (There is some jus­tice in the world.)

We showed her the bot­tles — one opened with an ounce-​or-​so miss­ing and other with the neck and cap still wrapped in foil — and briefly explained the prob­lem. We opened it, and let her smell it. She didn’t know what pome­gran­ates smelled like but agreed that the odor in the bot­tle was foul and prob­a­bly not the smell of pomegranates.

After clos­ing it, she looked at the older women and asked, “how should I do this?” Pre­sum­ably, this was her first refund of an opened bot­tle. (It was not a food store — more of an off-​price, department store.)

Rather than answer her col­league, the old woman snapped at us, “you can’t return it if you opened it.”

We replied that it is gen­er­ally dif­fi­cult to deter­mine if some­thing in a bot­tle is spoiled with­out actu­ally open­ing the bot­tle. (It’s not like we could see a dead mouse in the bot­tle, which — while not our prob­lem — does hap­pen more often than the reader might think — even in America.)

We think it was more our atti­tude than the words — for nearly twenty-​five years the look we gave her has been referred to as the “death stare” — but she shrunk back behind her cash reg­is­ter and called the next cus­tomer in line.

That’s when we remem­bered one of the lines spo­ken by Chief DanGeorge’s character, Lone Watie, in Clint Eastwood’s mid-​seventies, West­ern masterpiece,”The Out­law Josie Wales,” and we chuckled.

The reader may recall the scene in the bustling Texas town, where the white-​suited, carpet-​bagger tries to sell a bot­tle of elixir or potion or what­ever to Lone Watie, Josie’s side­kick. After inquir­ing what’s in it, the old Indian replies: “You Drink It.”

Hav­ing been assured our refund, we didn’t actu­ally say that to the old lady. How­ever, we did men­tion to her cute, younger col­league that we’d be happy to for­sake the refund of the open bot­tle if the older clerk would drink a sub­stan­tial por­tion of it. She laughed. Pre­sum­ably the older clerk has a per­son­al­ity like a bot­tle of bad pomegranate syrup.