Earl Preston retired from managing convenience stores. Nobody told Earl.
He still turns up at the 24/7 or the LTD, still believes he is the manager on duty, and still performs the task that mattered most: taking the day’s money to the bank. He lets himself behind the counter, collects the register, and sets off for the bank exactly as he did for decades.
From the outside it looks like a robbery. Staff react, somebody calls the police, and Earl keeps going, because the deposit needs to go in before the bank closes. He has led pursuits over it, at ninety years old, entirely unaware that anything unusual is happening. Everyone else’s read is completely reasonable and completely wrong.
When police finally stop him, he offers his proof: a 24/7 employee badge that expired in the year 2000. He produces it helpfully, early, and he is only puzzled when it does not settle the matter. He does not know what year it is, and the badge is current in his mind because the year it expired is, as far as Earl is concerned, roughly now.
He is friendly with everybody and will talk as long as they let him, about the deposit, about the store, about his wife Molly, who has been gone twenty years and who he speaks about in the present tense. She saw him off this morning. She is expecting him for dinner.
Somewhere in a conversation he has been fully engaged in for five minutes, he will look up at the person he is talking to and ask, plainly, “Who are you?”
He is the first character in the roster, and the situation is what is funny. Earl never is.
