My waterproof jacket self-destructed late last year, and while Melbourne hasn’t been over-endowed with rain recently, part of my plan to become a dedicated pedestrian includes having the appropriate gear to stroll down the street no matter what the weather, so I’d been meaning to buy a new one.

Last week via some junk mail I learnt about a Snowgum clearance sale (see, junk mail occasionally has its uses) and on Friday night I took the opportunity to take a look. It was at some Godforsaken warehouse out at Clayton in a real dump of a shopping centre where I suspect normally nobody ever goes and the only movement is tumbleweeds blowing through.

To my utter surprise, they had a waterproof jacket in my size, in a half-decent colour — dark blue; the only alternative was a kind of yeuch green. And it was made of that breathable material (a Goretex clone of some kind) that doesn’t leave you sweating inside it. Half-price, thank you very much, I’ll have one of those. Tried it out on Saturday, and although I missed the bulk of the rain, it worked well.

I also got a cheapo shirt and some camping cutlery for Peter for his birthday. One thing I noticed at the time was the lady at the checkout had to try my credit card twice. I didn’t think much more about it until Monday morning when my phone rang. It was someone at the bank querying Snowgum’s two transactions — one at $1150, the other a few seconds later for a much more reasonable $115.

The bank guy assured me it would be okay; the first one shouldn’t go through. Hope he’s right.

Reminds me a little of the time I was buying $1.50 of chips at the fish’n'chips place in Elsternwick and the guy who didn’t know how to use the register accidentally hit the double-zero button, making it $15.00. Then he hit it again: $1,500.00. Then he tried the single zero: $15,000.00 ,000. He couldn’t find the cancel button and let it go through, then took my $1.50. Being a small family-operated business I assume they were able to figure out at the end of the day what caused their register to be $14998.50 out.