true customer tales: The Grasshopper & the Spider

Two of our shop mascots are those old rubber toys with a spring and a suction cup, you'd push them down to make a seal and they'd eventually pop up and leap off the table. We have a spider and a grasshopper, and they've been dysfunctional as long as I've worked here, taped to a succession of cash registers until our latest (an otherwise exemplary Sam4s model) which has no suitable anchor point.  Now they're taped to the counter in front of the register, at the perfect height for fascinated children to mess with.

So, earlier a mom and little girl come up, and the little girl is seriously reminding me of Fuss.
The mom's trying to check out and have her get with the program, and the girl's totally ignoring her, wandering around in her own world with a book in one hand and a stuffed bear in the other.  Mom's getting progressively more frustrated and she does the counting thing and the "I guess you don't really want that book after all" thing, and is practically growling when the girl finally presents me with her book.

And is transfixed by our spider and grasshopper. 

While I'm ringing the sale the girl's trying to get the spider to stick, which it just can't, and ends up pulling it off the base.

"Put that back!" snaps Mom, reddening. "Right now! And don't touch the other one!"

The little girl locks eyes with Mom, purses her lips, theatrically drops the spider....then snatches the grasshopper off its base.

I burst out laughing, because it was such a total Fuss move.  

And then the little girl joined in while capering around her seething mom waving the grasshopper in the air.

"I'm sorry, I'm not helping at all," I apologized. 

"NO IT'S FINE" said Mom, from that alternate dimension inhabited by parents who were just pwned by their children and are heroically resisting the urge to drag them outside by the nearest body part.

Everything is in the perspective.  

I've been in her shoes, many times, driven to homicidal thoughts by my deliberately provocative child.  But seeing it from behind the counter, it was genuinely funny- this bold little girl insisting on her own agency and driving her mom crazy with it.  

Just like Fuss has always done, and hopefully always will.