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Honolulu Today LORNA ARLEN E Complexities of living brought about by war are, like Cleopatra’s charms, “of infinite variety.” Among them is the difficulty of getting the simplest things done in Honolulu these days. Take the matter of a shoe shine. A friend of ours approached a young shoeshine boy on a downtown corner and was startled when the boy refused to clean his shoes. “No can, bud. They brown and white, see? It’s fifteen cents for a shine, and I can do two pairs of all brown or all black while I’m doing your one. I’m too busy.” Then there’s the problem of getting a watch repaired. For a routine cleaning and check-up, they tell you it will take nine weeks and they can’t even guarantee that. And there’s the sign in the plumbing shop, “We can’t accept any new work at present.” Memorable was the advertisement placed in newspapers by a local laundry. “We’re completely exhausted, pooped, whipped down.We’re closing for a couple of weeks, so don’t come near us.” If you want to get a typewriter repaired, you have to get a 1-A priority. A friend of ours went to a radio shop to buy a new tube. “That will take a couple of weeks,” he was told.“But look.All I want is a new tube. I know the number and I will insert it myself. All you have to do is sell me the tube, now.” But it wasn’t that easy. “Listen, Mac, you see all these radios here, waiting to be repaired? We take them in the order they came in. Put your radio at the end of the line and when we get to it, you’ll have your new tube. Not before.” We bought an electric fan the other day, and it had to be mounted on a piece of plyboard before it could be placed in the living room window . This involved cutting two round holes a couple of inches in diameter and putting in four screws. Not being very mechanical, and not possessing a saw, we decided to take it to a well-known manufacturer 88 First published November 1942. of furniture. It would be a ten-minute job for a carpenter. But when we reached the furniture shop there was no sign of a masculine employee. There were a couple of women sitting disconsolately amid the few odds and ends of furniture left in the store. We explained our simple request and were told blankly,“No can. No got anybody to work here. All with the Engineers.” (We finally got a nine-year-old boy in the neighborhood to do the job.) We went to the dentist a couple of months ago, expecting him to be concerned about our long absence. He made a couple of dabs at the teeth, like a worker on a Ford assembly line, and said, “Don’t come back until school opens. I’m too busy.” Then there’s the business executive who smiled patronizingly when an old customer asked him by telephone to send over some merchandise. “We haven’t had a delivery boy for months,” he said. “You’ll have to come and get it.” A girl we know misplaced her car keys the other day, discovering the loss at four o’clock after a hectic day in the office. She knew she couldn’t leave the car on the street all night and called the police for advice. They were quite vague but said, “If you don’t find the keys by blackout time, give us another call.”Then she had a bright idea, called the agency for her make of car, and asked for a duplicate key. “Yes, we can get you another key,” she was told, “but you’ll have to have a priority from the military governor!” What she would have done if she hadn’t found the key is something we have not been able to figure out. We used to use white iodine on our nails, to overcome brittleness. But this practice has been abandoned because, in order to buy a fifteen -cent bottle you have to go to the office of the military governor for a priority. Little did we realize how simple life used to be. War!—1942 89 ...

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