Word: hapless
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...statuesque white-tailed buck grazes along a roadside in rural Virginia. Passing hunters slow their cars, aim their high-powered rifles out the window and fire -- then fire again when the deer neither falls nor flees. Three police cruisers suddenly surround the cars, and the hapless hunters discover they are the targets of a sting dubbed Bambiscam...
...rest of the cast has a tougher time of it. It is not always that they are untalented; individually they no doubt can hold their own with the best. But when asked to play a crowd scene as a group of battle-weary marines, these hapless undergrads come closer to innocents abroad. They exude the same kind of pseudo-confidence with which teen-age virgin boys discuss...
...junior high schools across the country this question--and kindred statements such as, "For all I know you don't exist"--have long provoked upperclassmen to perform wedgies upon hapless would-be philosophers. Yet the issue refuses to be dismissed with the onset of puberty...
...been a trying day indeed, Harry thought as he rode a bus home, but at least he could look forward to a trip to Florida the following week with his wife Harriet. That is, until Flyway Air called: "Sorry, Mr. Hapless. Due to our merger with Byway Air, your Florida flight has been canceled." Harry got so angry he was going to call the Federal Aviation Administration / immediately. But just then his phone went dead -- no doubt because the Bell System had been split up, he imagined. Well, that was the last straw. A few minutes later a wild-eyed...
More and more consumers are beginning to feel almost as frustrated as Harry Hapless. Personal service has become a maddeningly rare commodity in the American marketplace. Flight attendants, salesclerks and bank tellers all seem to have become too scarce and too busy to give consumers much attention. Many other service workers are underpaid, untrained and unmotivated for their jobs, to the chagrin of customers who look to them for help. The concept of personal service is a difficult quantity to measure precisely, to be sure; the U.S. Government keeps no Courtesy Index or Helpfulness Indicator among its economic statistics...