Do You Know Shanea Vernon, Sales Representative?

Let’s see if this six degrees of separation thing really works.

Image via Wikipedia

The Hub and I were visiting some friends yesterday.  Their son and his lovely girlfriend were there.  He is in the Army.  He and a colleague were on an RAF course recently and told the instructor that their nicknames were Maverick and Goose.  I can’t remember which one he was, so I’ll call him Moose.

This was the first time we had seen Moose since he returned from Afghanistan.  He was telling us some tales, and his little brother – shall we call him Mouse or Loose?  Or Louse? – showed us an American Army cap to illustrate one of them.  Moose had traded caps with a GI (are they still called that?).  One of those tight, pillbox-type hats with a peak that, in movies, are worn low over the eyes to make the soldier look disciplined and menacing.

Louse was fiddling with the hat as we chatted, when he discovered a worn business card tucked inside.  We passed it around the table and wondered why it was there.  Had the soldier (male) asked for it, or been given it, by Shanea Vernon, Sales Representative, because of a mutual attraction/attraction on one side and politeness on the other, or for a possible future business transaction?

Learning, to my shock, that I am a romantic at heart – or that I watch too many romcoms – I favour the idea that they met just before he was going off to war; felt something instinctual, animal and badly timed; and he kept her card in his cap so that it was always with him. 

The card had been folded up small and was badly creased: had he taken it out on cold desert nights and stroked it, thinking wistfully of the woman who gave it to him?  Or the new computer she sold to him and which his kids were now stickying up with their grubby, peanut butter and jellied hands?  Or the car he hopes to buy with the wages he’s saved while on his tour of duty?  I forgot to see what Shanea Vernon was representing, so I have to speculate.

What if Moose, by swapping caps, became the star that crossed potential lovers?  What if Shanea Vernon has the only thing for sale in existence that the soldier wanted but couldn’t afford to buy at the time he obtained her card?

What if I explode from never knowing the answers to all of these questions?

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to ask the people you know to ask the people they know to ask the people they know if they know Shanea Vernon.  Then to ask them the question: what, specifically, does she sell?

By the way, if any of your friends of friends of friends know Kevin Bacon, he is an acceptable substitute.