Sometimes the world is just silly and strange and you happen to say the exact right thing to the right person.
When I was working at the sex shop we had this one toy by Jimmy Jane. They gave store reps one as a freebie which was genius because we instantly converted to believers after being initially very skeptical.
The toys were small and pretty cute, but no one thought they’d pack much of a punch. The best of the lot looked like one of the little Totoros, two little pink ears sticking up from a rounded body. Unfortunately most customers would say it looked like a tooth.
So one day I’m showing it to a man looking for a gift for his girlfriend. “It has a motor in each ear, and it can pass the vibration back and forth between them. Fully submersible, it’s rechargeable, and really powerful for it size.”
He was just looking at it in intently.
“Are you going to say it looks like a tooth?”
“I get it. Personally I always thought it looks more like a cute rabbit, I’m always tempted to draw googly eyes on it.”
His expression froze and I stopped laughing, wondering what I could have said that so thoroughly checked him. Without a word he slowly reached down into his pocket and pulled something out.
“I think these are for you.”
If he’d had different vibes I wouldn’t have reached out my hand to accept his offering but up to that moment he’d just seemed like an awkward engineer type. I opened my hand to look at what he’d given me.
Two nicely cutout handmade cardboard googly eyes.
I lost it. “Why do you have these?!” I gasped between bursts of laughter.
“I made them! I always keep some on me, because you never know when you’ll see an opportunity to add eyes to something! But I think you should have these.”
I was absolutely delighted and after I rang him up for the toy I decided to tape them to our scanner. I couldn’t put them on the display toy but every time I used the scanner I’d laugh all over again about saying just the right thing to make someone pull handmade googly eyes out of his pocket.