Cardcaptor

A quasi-regular enters the store. She selects four movies and brings the tags up to the counter. As Fernando fills out the rental slip, she tells him, “I think I have one of them free.”

Fernando pauses in his tallying. “Could very well be. Let me check for you.” He sifts through the full cards in his possession while she waits. “Actually it doesn't look like you do.”

“Are you sure?” she asks.

“Pretty sure,” says Fernando, “But let me double-check.” He goes through the stack again, this time a bit more slowly. Nothing with her name on it materializes. “Nope, sorry.”

“Let me see that,” she says. Fernando shrugs and hands over the clump of cards. She begins rifling through them but stops after the first five or six. “How do you know whose are whose?”

“The name is written at the bottom.”

“Yeah, but how can you tell whose it is?”

“The name at the bottom.”

She squints down at the name written upon the card on the top of the stack and then glares at Fernando suspiciously. “You can't read that!” This is a fair statement, as Fernando's penmanship underwent linear degradation between the time he started learning how to write and today. Notetaking in university courses in the days before everyone and his cousin used a laptop necessitated a quick but accurate scrawl, and once Fernando attained the mantle of Keeper and no longer had to pretend to make things written on rental slips legible to others, all pretense of readability went straight out the window.

“I can. But look, you probably just used it last time you were in. You've got a new one started in the box and things will progress from there.” Fernando retrieves her new card from the box and shows that she has a paltry two stamps upon it.

Though she does not look entirely satisfied, Fernando's words and actions soothe her worries enough that no more is spoken of the matter.