Quantity II

For some reason, Louis, the head mechanic, was obsessed with the fact that I went to college. I think he mistakenly thought that I was the only duck captain to graduate with a four-year degree. He was also impressed by the fact that I went to a “good school” although he was never quite sure which one it was since no one out here has heard of Brown, unless they’re into that sort of thing. I think once he misheard my school as “Graham” (I guess I do have a mumbling problem) and I didn’t bother to correct him. This was even weirder, that he was impressed by me going to a school that he had never heard of because it didn’t exist.

He thought my captain name should be Sarah Bellum and my schtick should be that I was smart. While I appreciated the pun, I didn’t think the intelligence act would go over so well. First off, if I ever got any intelligent people on my duck, they would hate it even more. They would pity me, perhaps. (There is nothing worse than someone pretending to be intellectual, especially when they are driving an amphibious vehicle and wearing funny hats.) And everyone else would feel like I was being condescending.

It depended on the tour. I would literally say at least three times over the course of the 90-minute tour that the Space Needle was 605 feet tall. It was kind of a running joke that the Space Needle was so omnipresent and all. Although it’s better than the Liberty Bell. At least the Space Needle is somewhat impressive to look at. The Liberty Bell has ridiculous security. I almost got the mini-Swiss army knife taken away when I had made it through airline security with it on my keychain just a week before. And then at the end of the tour I would do a little quiz. Sometimes before I even asked the first question, someone would say “How tall is the Space Needle?” Sometimes I would actually ask the question and people would blurt out all kinds of incorrect answers. The funny thing is that I really wanted people to learn something about the city. I felt like I was letting them down if I didn’t share with them at least one fact they could throw around at their next cocktail party. They didn’t seem to care, though. I was really not sure what people were expecting when they bought tickets. I think I tend to project and so I imagined that everyone was like me, skeptical of the cheesiness. But that didn’t really make sense. If you knew what you were getting into, why oh why would you ever buy a ticket? So then I started thinking that they were just normal people looking for a normal tour of Seattle. But what I realized is that those people were on the Gray Line tours, the people who wanted to learn about the history and all that. People on the ducks, by and large, wanted to have fun. They wanted to buy the fun we were selling. They wanted me to make them dance to cheesy ‘70’s songs. It was kind of a paradox. (What do you call two doctors?)