RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32565, 26 March 1971, Page 19

RANDOM REMINDER

MYSTERY PARCELS

We have had a note from a reader who is perplexed by the ways of footwear store operators. Someone may be able to help him solve his puzzle. He was in need of some laces for his tennis shoes, and called at a shoe store in Rangiora to buy them. The transaction was completed in the normal way. He took his tennis shoe laces away, and discovered that they were far too small for his tennis shoes. A day later he was at the store again, and met the assistant outside the shop. He explained his

problem: the laces were too short. The assistant looked at him admonishingly. “You should have bought football laces,” he said. This item of information was somewhat startling to the purchaser, but he accepted the probability that the shoe people knew more about what sort of laces were needed for tennis shoes than he did. So he went inside the store and asked the girl behind the counter for a pair of football laces. “Do you,” she said primly, “want them for football boots?”

He. said,, he did not, and went on to explain that he needed them for hij tennis shoes because the tennis shoe laces he had bought were t6o small. ‘ She heard- him out, patiently. “That’s quite ail right, then,” she said. “If you had wanted them for football boots, you should have i asked for cricket boot < laces.” Our correspondent records that the football bpot laces fit his tennis shoes perfectly. But what, he says, do they wear in cricket boots?