Buffragette City!

Life -

At my job, I have roughly 6 customers that I dread seeing every night.

1 - Santa. This man is an older gentleman that looks exactly like Santa Claus. He wears an oxygen tank and wanders around the store for hours. I actually get a kick out of him, he's good natured and friendly, but he wears out his welcome after four hours of telling me fish stories and dirty jokes. He also has constant problems with his perceived costs of sale items and requests a lot of rain checks, which I hate writing out.

2 - The lady with the strange growth on her face. I love her, i really do. The story she told me about her father's bar during prohibition is one of my favorites, and she talks with me about movies. She's one of those people that I should despise, but due to a combination of her healthy UFO conspiracies and refusal to leave the house during daylight hours I don't, but like Santa, every time she's in, I can guarantee at least 3 hours of work down the drain.

3 - St. Patty. An extremely Irish war vet, St. P. has a tendency to call around a dozen times a night when he's active, asking us the same questions over and over. He also likes to read us his poetry over the phone. Most of what he says is an unintelligible mish-mash of Irish Brogue and Drunken Mumbling, but I get the impression that his poetry is about the war. He often stops and says "Huh, laddie. What do ye' think of that?" assuming, he's asking me a question I start to respond, only to be cut off by more "poetry" so maybe it's actually part of the work. If, at any time during the call, which can stretch for hours, you have to put him on hold, he hangs up, calls back and angerly chastises you, then calls a taxi to take him over to the store, where he can act like it never happened.

4 - Ms. Paul Bunyon. One of those ladies that looks like a man in a dress, Ms. PB is mentally disturbed and frankly, I think she uses that as an excuse for being a jerk to everyone. She's also a price switcher, sometimes going so far as to take entire rows of things and place them in front of a cheaper price. I refuse to let her do this, unlike the manager that works the opposite shift, so Ms. PB and I are enemies.

5 - The really big, grumpy smelly guy. This guys is probably around 380lbs, constantly rates "Oscar" on the grouch scale and smells a bit below the Bog Of Eternal Stench on the "Smell Bad" scale.

6 - The annoying drunk ladies that think it's hilarious to make messes on aisles. These ladies are in their late thirties. I expect teens to play with the whoopee cushions and throw sponges at each other, these broads (A term I reserve for number 6 and any woman that tries to get me killed while solving PI cases only) these broads should know better.


All of these customers but Ms. PB were in last night, she likely saw that the other manager's car wasn't out front and went back to her trailer, muttering. In fact, I think I could actually feel the earth shudder when, for around an hour, St. Patty, Santa and Paranoia Lady were all in the store at the same time. Ugh.

I heard talk about how people with leg injuries should be hung in the Vatican, the link between Viagra and watermelon, German film festivals and bad premonitions about Obama, and spent an hour cleaning up messes left on floors.

Oh yeah, we also had to deal with the indignity of our Ludicrously Sexist and Crude Floor Dude. Not only did he ask how often I got hot babes in with no underpants (In Pocatello at 3am on a Wednesday? Not often.) and speculated on what two animals mated to create a manager at a different store, but his buffer was leaky and left a likely toxic cloud of propane fumes in the store. Luckily, they muffled the smell of Oscar.



Writing -

Uhh, I think I wrote about 200 words while I listened to Santa yammer on about fishing and the price of blackberries.

The Last Sentence -

It's around forty degrees and there's a thick fog blanketing most of the world.

From - "Graves" (WIP)