For over 20 years I made the rounds of all the pawn shops in this area at least once a month looking for camera equipment to resell. Because I was a regular customer and bought so much I would get a better price than most, and got to know some real characters as a result. I pretty much got hooked on pawn shop hopping and still drop in one or the other on a fairly regular basis.
This morning I went to Tupelo and bought a new gas powered hedge trimmer at Lowes. On the way home I noticed a pawn shop I used to buy quite a bit of camera equipment, and an occasional metal detector, in had built a new building on east main street and stopped to see if they had anything I was interested in. The same old guy that ran the pawn shop at the other location for 30 years still runs the place and remembered me. He's in his early 70's and looks and talks like a member of the Darling family from the Andy Griffith TV show. They didn't have all that much stuff moved in yet but they had some lawn equipment, a couple of lawn mowers, three electric hedge trimmers and two electric leaf blowers. One of the leaf blowers was a Craftsman that looked new and had a sticker on the side that said it blew air at 200 mile per hour.
I picked it up and noticed the Off/On two speed switch was stuck in the On/High position and the output tube was loose. The old guy saw me looking at it and went into his sales pitch. I asked did it work and he said it worked great, to give it to him and he would plug it in and show me. I handed it across the counter to him, he plugged it in and with a roar like a jet airplane taking off it shot the output tube off. The tube barely missed a fat woman who was looking at some stereo equipment and hit a plate glass window so hard I thought it would have broken it. The old guy stumbled around behind the counter for several seconds, punching at the switch and knocking tools and stuff off a shelf behind him and almost fell trying to get it unplugged. Then he set the blower on the counter and calmly said, "Bad Switch", as though nothing had happened. It had a $20 tag on it but he said I could have it for an even $10 and no tax since the switch was bad so I bought it. I grinned halfway home thinking about what happened in the pawn shop, but the excitement wasn't over.
When I got home my wife was sitting in a recliner reading the paper and my daughters cat was laying on the top of the recliner back just over her head. I showed her the blower and told her how hard it would blow, she said plug it in and let her see. Neither of us thought about how it would affect the cat. I was standing about two feet from the cats head when I plugged the blower in, for about a thousandth of a second. The cat let out a screech, jumped almost to the ceiling and came down on my wifes head,.....but it didn't stay there very long. Never seen anything move that fast. It was gone before I could blink, bad thing was when it left it took a chunk of my wife's hair with it and she let out a screech that drowned out both the cat and leaf blower.
After the cat and my wife calmed down I put a switch in the leaf blower and it works fine. But if it hadn't worked at all I got way more than $10 worth of excitement and fun out of it
This morning I went to Tupelo and bought a new gas powered hedge trimmer at Lowes. On the way home I noticed a pawn shop I used to buy quite a bit of camera equipment, and an occasional metal detector, in had built a new building on east main street and stopped to see if they had anything I was interested in. The same old guy that ran the pawn shop at the other location for 30 years still runs the place and remembered me. He's in his early 70's and looks and talks like a member of the Darling family from the Andy Griffith TV show. They didn't have all that much stuff moved in yet but they had some lawn equipment, a couple of lawn mowers, three electric hedge trimmers and two electric leaf blowers. One of the leaf blowers was a Craftsman that looked new and had a sticker on the side that said it blew air at 200 mile per hour.
I picked it up and noticed the Off/On two speed switch was stuck in the On/High position and the output tube was loose. The old guy saw me looking at it and went into his sales pitch. I asked did it work and he said it worked great, to give it to him and he would plug it in and show me. I handed it across the counter to him, he plugged it in and with a roar like a jet airplane taking off it shot the output tube off. The tube barely missed a fat woman who was looking at some stereo equipment and hit a plate glass window so hard I thought it would have broken it. The old guy stumbled around behind the counter for several seconds, punching at the switch and knocking tools and stuff off a shelf behind him and almost fell trying to get it unplugged. Then he set the blower on the counter and calmly said, "Bad Switch", as though nothing had happened. It had a $20 tag on it but he said I could have it for an even $10 and no tax since the switch was bad so I bought it. I grinned halfway home thinking about what happened in the pawn shop, but the excitement wasn't over.
When I got home my wife was sitting in a recliner reading the paper and my daughters cat was laying on the top of the recliner back just over her head. I showed her the blower and told her how hard it would blow, she said plug it in and let her see. Neither of us thought about how it would affect the cat. I was standing about two feet from the cats head when I plugged the blower in, for about a thousandth of a second. The cat let out a screech, jumped almost to the ceiling and came down on my wifes head,.....but it didn't stay there very long. Never seen anything move that fast. It was gone before I could blink, bad thing was when it left it took a chunk of my wife's hair with it and she let out a screech that drowned out both the cat and leaf blower.
After the cat and my wife calmed down I put a switch in the leaf blower and it works fine. But if it hadn't worked at all I got way more than $10 worth of excitement and fun out of it
