Broadly speaking there are two kinds of people. Those who understand how extremely useful white cables can be, and those who don't. Jimmy is the first of these. He loves white cables. And white telephones. And white computer monitors with fruit on the back. That's more or less the sum of what Ove has absorbed during the car journey into town, when Jimmy natters on excitedly about the sorts of things every rational person ought to be so insuperably interested in, until Ove at last sinks into a sort of deeply meditative state of mind, in which the overweight young man's babbling turns to a dull hissing in his ears.
As soon as the young man thundered into the passenger seat of the Saab with a large sandwich in his hand, Ove obviously wished he hadn't asked for Jimmy's help with this. Things are not improved by Jimmy aimlessly shuffling off to "check a few leads" as soon as they enter the shop.
If you want something done you have to do it yourself, as usual, Ove confirms to himself as he steers his steps alone towards the sales assistant. And not until Ove roars, "Have you been frontally lobotomized or what?!" to the young man who's trying to show him the shop's range of portable computers does Jimmy come hurrying to his aid. And then it's not Ove but rather the shop assistant who needs to be aided.
"We're together." Jimmy nods to the assistant with a glance that sort of functions as a secret handshake to communicate the message, "Don't worry,
I'm one of you!"
The sales assistant takes a long, frustrated breath and points at Ove.
"I'm trying to help him but—"
"You're just trying to fob me off with a load of CRAP, that's what you're doing!" Ove yells back at him without letting him get to a full stop, and menacing him with something he spontaneously snatches off the nearest shelf.
Ove doesn't quite know what it is, but it looks like a white electrical plug of some sort and it feels like the sort of thing he could throw very hard at the sales assistant if the need arises. The sales assistant looks at Jimmy with a sort of twitching around his eyes that Ove seems adept at generating in people with whom he comes into contact. This is so frequent that one could possibly name a syndrome after him.
"He didn't mean any harm, man," Jimmy tries to say pleasantly.
"I'm trying to show him a MacBook and he's asking me what sort of car I drive," the sales assistant bursts out, looking genuinely hurt.
"It's a relevant question," mutters Ove, with a firm nod at Jimmy.
"I don't have a car! Because I think it's unnecessary and I want to use more environmentally friendly modes of transportation!" says the sales assistant in a tone of voice pitched somewhere between intransigent anger and the fetal position.
Ove looks at Jimmy and throws out his arms, as if this should explain everything.
"You can't reason with a person like that." He nods and evidently expects immediate support. "Where the hell have you been, anyway?"
"I was just checking out the monitors over there, you know," explains Jimmy.
"Are you buying a monitor?" asks Ove.
"No," says Jimmy and looks at Ove as if it was a really strange question, more or less in the way that Sonja used to ask, "What's that got to do with it?" when Ove asked her if she really "needed" another pair of shoes.
The sales assistant tries to turn around and steal away, but Ove quickly puts his leg forward to stop him.
"Where are you going? We're not done here."
The sales assistant looks deeply unhappy now. Jimmy pats him on the back, to encourage him.
"Ove here just wants to check out an iPad—can you sort us out?" The sales assistant gives Ove a grim look.
