Everyone loves Calloway

 

Could I please invite my Tauranga readers, both of you, to head down to the record store Vinyl Destination in Devonport Rd and pick up either a long player or a short black.

Why? Beacuse they’ve just made a mess of a bureaucrat in a way that’s got folk laughing right around the globe.

Before we begin, let me introduce you to Calloway:

As you can see, Calloway is a cat who guards record bins – and Calloway’s presence on those bins was the very reason the bureaucrat was drawn to the store, brought there by a wowser’s complaint. I quote here from an American pet website:

That complaint initially came in the form of a message to the store’s Facebook page… the message stated, “You shouldn’t be allowed to do it” and “This is terrible. This is a cat in a place where you sell food.”
    The person making the complaint also stated that having the cat in the store was unprofessional and disgusting, [store owner Luke] Wormald added.
    The “food” in reference was the coffee customers can get to go. Wormald told the paper that he pretty much told the person to get a life prompting “a call from the council saying they’ve had an anonymous phone call complaining about the cat.”

Fortunately sanity prevailed, as it sometimes does in this fine land, and so charmed was the visiting bureaucrat by Calloway that he remembered that while “Animals must not be allowed in any area used for the processing and handling of food,” pets however “may — at the discretion of the business — be allowed in customer areas provided food on display is protected from contamination.”

So apart from the anonymous wowser, everyone loves Calloway. And to that wowser store owner Luke Wormald has extended an invitation “just to make sure there's no animosity”:

You have a free coffee waiting for you anytime here, all we ask is that you apologise to Callaway first -- he’s still pretty dark and his feelings have been hurt badly through this ordeal.

To be fair, he seems pretty relaxed to me. Maybe because he knows just how much free advertising for the store the wowser has just bought them.

Here’s Cab Calloway:

[Hat tip Monica B.]

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