When I was 25 I went back to school as an adult to get my Grade 12. One day I got perfect on a math test (trigonometry) - I hadn’t had a perfect math test since public school - and I was so proud of myself. I worked at a little store that sold cigarettes, cigars, pop & chips and I was showing just about every customer my perfect math test. A regular customer came in and I showed him. He looked at it then said “That’s really good. Let me buy you a coffee for that.” He went to the food court and came back with a coffee for me. Made my day.
I’ve managed to avoid retail (and food-related jobs) and this thread reassures me that I should continue to do so. While I find the stories entertaining, I’m pretty sure my opinion would change should I find myself behind a counter. Plus I’d probably end up in jail…
:eek:
Retail and foodservice are young folks’ jobs. I could not put up with the level of sheer crap that one puts up with as a waiter or counterman at this point in my life … not like I once did.
Teaching is marginally better. Marginally.
When I was in high school, I worked at a CVS as the front cashier and photo lab technician. I have several stories from this time but I will tell you two of them.
-
My manager gave me a roll of film and asked me to develop them for her. she also didn’t want a ticket for them or anything. We weren’t allowed to just develop film without the tracking system because the tracking system allowed us to keep track of how much was earned. I entered it in anyway and set about developing the film and prints. When you go to make prints from the developed negatives, you have to look at the pictures on a computer screen. This allows you to make adjustments as needed and helps make sure the prints come out nice. So I put her developed film in the machine to make her prints and immediately avert my eyes. Oh my goodness, she was not wearing enough clothing. I quickly click through her roll and flip all the pictures over as soon as possible when they come out. I didn’t say anything to her when she came to collect her pictures.
-
A young man came in about 10 minutes to closing time. I am manning the front cash register and my manager is off setting out the bins for tomorrow’s crew to stock for the upcoming sale. The young man sheepishly approaches me and asks me a question that he had clearly been working up to. “Do you carry latex-free condoms?” Of course we have latex-free condoms and I reply affirmatively and tell him where to find them. He disappears into the aisles and come back bearing every single package of latex-free condoms we have. He then asks, a bit more boldly this time, if we carry cases of the things. I direct him to my boss and he scurries off again. When he returns, he tells me why he needs so many condoms. He has just gotten married and his new wife is allergic to latex. He was stocking up for their honeymoon.
My daughter is a teacher (7th grade science) and she’s a very good teacher. But she hates the BS that political powers that be have put into education and, alas, she’s looking into a career change. But that’s another sad thread…
…that I was just thinking about this a couple days ago.
I did a short stint on the Graveyard shift at a 7-11 in a quiet little corner of San Diego, back when San Diego still had quiet little corners. The Disco era had passed so white men and women were no longer getting their hair done in the Afro style. The metallic eyeliner and lipstick fashion would never die among some populations. However, the pendulum hadn’t yet swung the other way with African-Americans straightening and coloring their hair as is common now.
On Friday there had been an all-staff meeting (a dozen of us) in the back room. One of the supervisors noted that there were corporate checkers randomly hitting the county’s stores at any time of the day so stick to the rules and regulations. Meanwhile, ATF was also checking stores for age and lock-out compliance (no alcohol sales were allowed between 2AM and 6AM). Furthermore, with Winter Break upon us, there seemed to be a lot of Beer Dashers from the local colleges and we weren’t allowed to put solenoid-bolts on the doors. For those who don’t know the term, a Beer Dasher is a guy who grabs a suitcase (24-pack) of beer, brings it toward the cashier’s counter, then dashes out the door without paying). They’re invariably assisted by an accomplice who’s waiting in the parking lot with the car running. Lastly, with the holidays approaching, there was an expected rise in shoplifting.
One of my friends had found this weird job in which he and a crew packed boxes and prepared them for shipping. It started at 3PM when the company’s order desk closed and ran until ‘whenever’ so the UPS pick-up could grab their stuff first thing in the morning. There were a lot of nights when he’d would stop by after his shift and we’d chat about whatever. One night he stopped by a little after 1:30 in the morning to chat. After a while I interrupted our conversation to grab The Key and stroll back to the coolers and lock up the beer and wine. Then I spent a few minutes inside the giant walk-in refrigerator, restocking the milk and beer to patrons could easily open the brass-framed glass doors and grab whatever tickled their fancy off the slanted shelves. Then I came back to chat some more about our dislike of tatoos, how we associated them with the Yakuza (crime syndicate) culture of our ancestry and partly and that we felt a person’s skin shouldn’t be a portable billboard for a person’s latest fad interest.
Suddenly a car pulled very quickly into a parking space in front of the store. Two girls got out of the car, one on each side, and paused to close and lock the doors. While they paused, I could hear the driver continuing, “…and I can’t believe JoAnne just winked at him and swept him off. I woulda done him so good so fast…”
Well, that caught our attention. We looked out to the parking lot to see two slim college girls. The driver was tall and dark-skinned, with bright red hair hanging in waves down to her shoulders; the passenger was short and pale-skinned, with a short blonde pixie cut. As they turned to approach the front doors, the blonde seemed to stumble over the little cement wheel-bumper in the parking lot while the redhead looked down and carefully stepped over the one on her side – and I realized the parking lot only had the cement bumpers on every-other space. The two girls tried to sashay – and I mean sashay, like Ginger’s exhagerated I-need-a-favor-from-you-Gilligan attempt to be seductive – from the front doors to the cashier’s counter except that the blonde seemed more wobbly than wiggly.
“Hi guys!” the redhead poured all the charm in the universe into a radiantly white smile – and this was years before even the cosmetic dentistry specialists would be selling gum-bleaching and tooth-whitening schemes – and utterly failed to win our hearts. She looked exotic in certain ways, like a black girl who had straightened and dyed her hair to stand out as different. Meanwhile, the passenger turned down the chips-and-candy aisle and headed straight for the beer section of the coolers.
Now the ‘beer locks’ were simple cheap brass devices mounted on the surface of the door and the strip of metal behind the door. They were installed to minimally comply with the 2AM - 6AM dry spell that everyone was required to live by. If a determined tippler wanted to get past the locks, a determined pull with a firm grip would have ripped the hasp off the cooler facade and left the glass display doors intact. Most people, when they encountered the slightly stronger-than-usual suction force of the cooler’s vaccuum effect pulling on the doors (for instance, after someone else just grabbed something out of the cooler and closed the door a moment ago), would just find their fingers slipping off the door handle because the door was harder to open than expected.
And I’m not making a dumb blonde joke now and I wasn’t expecting the situation to come up, but I happened to be looking down the chips-and-candy aisle and admiring the blonde’s derriere as she bent over to look at the beer. And when she reached up and pulled on the door handle, the the ‘beer lock’ gave her some resistance and her hand slipped off. And this is the point where most people would wonder why did my hand slip off? but instead, the blonde continued staring at the beer, reached up to grasp the door handle firmly, and gave a good strong pull. This action served to drag her entire body forward, face-first, into the brass-framed glass door of the beer cooler.
I remember ignoring the patter of my friend and the redhead while oggling the blonde and thinking to myself, “My! What a fine – Oh my God what is she doing over there!?”
And it was then that I realized she was drunk – and why she had stumbled over a wheel-bumper that wasn’t even there.
The blonde straightened up and turned to look toward me, so naturally I turned my head and stifled my laughter and tried to look like I was gazing out at the parking lot. Out of one corner of my eye I could see her rubbing her forehead and nose, as if that would wipe away her red blush of embarassment. Meanwhile I could see the front of the car and confirmed to myself that there was no cement wheel-bumper in front of the passenger side of the car.
And then the rage came.
“Why are those locked?” the blonde called to me angrily as she stalked toward me along the chips-and-candy aisle. Suddenly she didn’t seem so drunk. Just as suddenly, the light conversation between my friend and her friend stopped.
“It’s after two.” I mumbled without even looking at her.
“Those aren’t supposed to be locked until two A M.” the blonde continued as if she hadn’t heard me. Her voice had grown louder, as well, and not just because she was moving closer to me.
“It’s past two A M.” I told her and tried to appear casual as I turned my head to look in her direction.
“It is NOT past two A M!” she argued, “Do you know how fast I drove to get here?”
I was befuddled for a moment because I couldn’t quite understand what one issue had to do with the other. My friend rescued me by pointing to his new acquaintance and saying, “I thought she drove.”
“Well you know what I mean!” the blonde insisted and followed up by pointing at the clock on the back wall of the cashier’s booth, which showed a digital 2:11 on its face, “It CAN’T BE past two A M!”
I glanced at the clock and looked back at the blonde, giving her a Spock-ish one-eyebrow salute.
“That clock is wrong!” the blonde persisted, “It has to be! Call TIME and check!”
Back then, TIME was a telephone service that could be called, free of charge, to find out exactly what time it was in your community. In San Diego, the number was listed as 853-1212 and some of us had discovered that by dialing 853 + any four digits the same service would answer, with a lovely-voiced lady telling the caller the exact time, to the ten-second mark, usually three or four times before automatically disconnecting the call.
“Ma’am, I don’t need to call time.” I explained, “I trust my clocks.”
“NO!” the blonde responded as she stepped up to the cashier’s booth and pounded on the counter. I suppose the action was supposed to appear intimidating, but the college girl was roughly five-and-a-half feet tall, couldn’t have weight much more than 125 pounds, and had a quavery alto voice. She could have been the little sister of Sandy Duncan, a cute little actress most famous as a spokeswoman for Triscuit commercials. Furthermore, the cashier’s booth was a 40-inch high set of 3/4" plywood cabinets covered in a quarter-inch veneer and set upon a platform that raised everything up by six inches. This cute little cheerleader of a pixie pounded angrily on the countertop that stood just below her chin, and the sound that failed to echo forth was like a bestselling paperback book hitting a cement foundation. The worst jolt I got wasn’t from her fist hitting the countertop but from her beer-soaked breath hitting me in the face. I really had to force myself to take her rage seriously as she challenged, “I insist! It’s my right! And if you’re wrong you owe me a free beer!”
So I look over at my friend. We talked about this later and my thoughts were, “Did she just try to conflate ‘right’ in terms of legality with ‘right’ in terms of factuality?” while I thought his expression said, “Are you really putting up with this?” Meanwhile, he thought my expression said, “Does she really think she’s intimidating?” while his thoughts were, “How does it follow that she gets a free beer out of this?”
And we looked over at her friend, the redhead. And when we talked about it later I said I thought her blank expression was one that said, “I’m not moving; they won’t notice me; I wasn’t here; I’m not here; this is not happening.” whle my friend said he interpreted her expression to be “This is happening yet again; I’m not participating; I don’t condone this behavior.”
So the redhead stayed silent and still while my friend and I glanced around and the blonde was getting impatient and was about to pound on the counter and probably harder the second time. And since I didn’t want this little pixie breaking her hand at my workplace – because, no doubt, she’d sue the store and make my manager pay her in beer – I raised my hands as if to placate her and said, “Fine. I’ll call TIME for you.”
So I stepped over to the phone and knelt in front of the little cabinet below it and rummaged around the lost-and-found and junk underneath there, mumbling loudly, “Now where’s that phone book?”
“Oh, don’t gimme that shit!” the blonde bellowed, “It’s 853-1212! Everybody knows that! Quit stalling.”
“Who cares if he stalls?” my friend quipped, “It’s already past two.” and I could feel the extraenous heat from the photon torpedos the blonde was firing over my head from her eyes to my friend’s face.
I knew that ruse had failed, so I abandoned it and stood up and grabbed the handset off the phone.
Now, back then, a lot of people still owned phones made and issued by one of the Bell companies – even though Ma Bell had been broken up into Baby Bells and several other competitors years earlier, and a lot of people had newer push-button phones made by Plantronics and Radio Shack and other third-party enterprises. Furthermore, touch-tone phones had been around even when Ma Bell dominated the American telephone industry. Nevertheless, my manager had a simple desktop rotary-dial phone that weighed about ten pounds and was made of ugly maroon-red plastic, which customers were not allowed to use and which worked just fine for his needs. The better phone equipment was in the back room, where the tiny office was located.
And so I placed the receiver to my year and called out the numbers I was dialing.
“Eight.” I announced and stuck my finger in the hole over the eight. I dragged my finger around the rotary device and stopped where the little metal hook made me stop. And then I repeated, in my mind, at a slow and steady pace as if I was reading a fairy tale to a child, the whole seven-digit phone number. Then I pulled my finger our of the rotator and it rolled smoothly back to its idle position. When I listened to the phone I heard nothing, not even a dial-tone. That was good.
“Five!” I announced and stuck my finger in the hole over the five. I dragged my finger around the rotary device and stopped where the little metal hook made me stop. And then I mentally repeated, at a slow and steady pace as if I was reading a fairy tale to a child, the whole seven-digit phone number. Then I pulled my finger our of the rotator and it rolled smoothly back to its idle position and when I listened to the phone I heard nothing, not even a dial-tone. That was good.
“Three!” I announced and stuck my finger in the hole over the three. I dragged my finger around the rotary device and stopped where the little metal hook made me stop.
“You’re going too slow!” the blonde protested. It was practically a scream of rage.
“Lady, this is an ancient phone.” I told her, “I’m dialing as fast as I was taught to do with these things.” But to compromise, I mentally rattled off the phone number for TIME quickly, as if I was a radio narrator reading the caveats and fine print in a stock broker’s advertising commercial. And, even then, when I let the rotator spin back to its idle position and checked the speaker on the handset, I was surprised to hear a dial-tone again. That’s a quirk of those old things: If you hold the rotator in one place for too long, you may as well have been holding down the buttons that let the phone know the handset is in place; it acts like you had simply hung up the phone.
And I could hear the dial-tone and I knew the handset’s speaker was loud enough that everyone else in the store could hear it as well (since, after all, they were all gathered around the cashier’s booth). And I glanced over at my friend to see that he was slightly amused by the trick, and I glanced over at the redhead to see her still trying to be not-there, and I looked over at the pixie blonde and saw her face turn a darker shade of red. So just before she could blurt out something rude, I said, “Aww, gosh. I’m really sorry, you were right – I was dialing too slow.”
So I dialed TIME a second time, letting the rotator return just as soon as my finger touched the little metal hook, and I listened to a nice lady say, “At the tone, the time will be…two…oh eight…and twenty seconds…” and she struck a little chime that went ding very clearly.
I figured that settled the matter but realized also that I was the only one to hear that announcement. So I looked at my friend and pursed my lips and held out the handset. He took the handset and listened to the nice lady say, “…will be…two…oh eight…and thirty seconds…” and I assume she struck the little chime that went ding very clearly because my friend tipped his chin forward very quickly, as if he had been lightly smacked on the back of the head. And he nodded to me and handed the handset back and said, “Yep.”
But I figured that was a bit biased for me and my friend to hear it and pronounce our judgement so I reached out and put the handset against the side of the redhead’s skull, guessing roughly where her ear would be underneath her fiery locks. The redhead seemed to come out of her trance and looked at me through metallic pink -shaded eyelids, adjusted her head, and listend to the nice lady say, “…eight…and forty seconds…” and she, too, tipped her chin forward very quickly to indicate the timing mark Then she looked at me and my friend and nodded in agreement.
And I realized it certainly wouldn’t do to have the three of us conspiring against the beer-addicted blonde, so I held the handset out to her. It looked like she was ready to pout about being left out, but she brightened up when I offered her the handset. She took it and put the speaker end to her ear and I could see her expression turn from receptive curiosity back to anger as she listened, then she frowned at me and said, “It’s just a dial tone!”
“Hey!” I deflected what seemed like an accusation of fraud as she gave the handset back to me, "Would I – " then I pointed to the redhead, “Would SHE lie to you?”
The blonde was clearly unconvinced by my argument and the redhead looked at me and shook her head with an expression that said, “Please don’t drag me into this!”
“Look,” I offered, “I’ll dial it again.” and I proceeded to redial the number, not pausing between digits to intentionally mess up the results, and announcing as I dialed, “Eight…five…three…” and as I dialed the last digit I gave the handset to the blonde and said, “Please. And tell us what you hear, as she’s saying it.”
The blonde nodded and snatched the handset out of my hand and put it to her ear, “At the tone…the time will be…ten–dammit! That’s not fair!”
“Hey,” I offered absolutely no sympathy while tugging on the curly cord to retreive the handset, “life isn’t fair.”
“Oh, don’t give me that!” she spat back. And then she paused and I could almost see the lights flashing behind her eyes as the mainframe computer inside her head desperately tried to compute the logistics of a new set of programming instructions. After about five seconds of silence, her scowl turned to a warm smile and she asked, sweetly, “Can I just, you know, read one of those labels?”
“What?” I have to admit the new approach caught me off guard at first, “Read the labels?”
“On a beer can?” my friend chimed in.
“Well, yeah.” the blonde nodded, “Just to see the what’s in it, so I know how many calories–”
“You want me to open the door so you can scrutinize the ingredients?” I was dubious.
“Yeah.”
“No.”
“Wh–why not?”
“Because,” I explained, “If I open that door, you might dash.”
“Dash?” the blonde was unfamiliar with the term but figured it out quickly enough, “You mean steal? Why do you think–”
My expression must have told her enough. That or she was sobering up enough to start thinking ahead and using some form of logic or reasoning. Or not.
“Fine!” she said in exasperation. Then she seemed to switch tactics again and launched into a weird accusation, “You blew it. You just blew it.”
“Excuse me?”
“No, no.” she refused, “You just blew your chance to be a decent person. Now I’ve got to go home, where there’s no beer in the fridge, and all I can drink is the shit in my parents’ liquor cabinet. That’s hard shit. That’s whiskey and vodka because that’s all my dad drinks. That’s rum for my mom’s margaritas.”
“I see.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her margaritas are made with tequila.
“No,” she argued. “you don’t. You coulda given me a beer. That’s two percent alcohol–”
“Four.”
“But instead I’ve gotta drink the hard stuff. That’s like eighty percent alcohol–”
“Actually eighty proof, which is only forty percent.”
“–and you’re gonna have that on your conscience: That you turned me into a hard alcoholic instead of a social drinker.”
“Well, either you’re–”
“Would you STOP correcting me?!” she demanded, “You refusing to sell me a beer means–”
“Means I don’t get busted for breaking the liquor laws,” I interrupted forcefully, “so I get to keep my job.”
That stopped her for just a moment, but she was persistent, “Oh, it’s not like there’s liquor police out there waiting to swoop in and–”
And that’s when I took just a bit of a gamble on the matter and interrupted again, “Actually there are.”
“What?!” everyone outside the cashiers’ booth chorused.
“Yeah,” I nodded. It was about a quarter-after two by then and I knew that the local cops came in around 2:30AM for coffee. I had no idea where they were before that time, but I was improvising, “Actually, there’s one across the street.”
“Yeah, right.” the blonde called my bluff.
“No, really,” I lied, “Right over there at the gas station, to the left of the Taco Bell.”
“Bullsh–” the blonde countered while glancing out the window. For whatever reason, there was a patrol car at the Mobil station. The guy was probably just filling the tank, but he happened to be there at the exact right moment. The blonde cut herself off and her demeanor changed again, “Oh my god! He’s right!”
“What?!” the friends asked, and stepped toward the window to confirm the sighting.
“I’m sorry.” the blonde was suddenly meek in the (relative) presence of law enforcement. Like a cat that had gotten caught circling a birdcage, she slinked out the front doors and stood by the passenger door of the car. While my friend and I tried to be courteous and stifle our laughter, the redhead followed the blonde out and unlocked the car for her friend.
Then, to our surprise, she came back into the store. She proceeded to walk (not sashay) straight to the counter look up at me with a sweet plastic smile through lips coated with metallic pink lipstick.
“I’m really sorry about that guys.” she announced, “Is there any way I can make it up to you?”
My friend’s jaw simply dropped.
I, on the other hand, was very cynical after my argument with her friend. My thoughts were, What? You’re gonna take us both to the back room and let us double-team you over the extra Slurpee cups and Pampers while your friend just sits in the car for an hour? Come on, now, your friend’s got drinking to do and there’s no time to waste!
But, I must admit, a part of me found the opportunity enticing–until I looked down at her (well, down at her cleavage) and saw freckles. Then it suddenly dawned on me that this girl I had been ignoring all night wasn’t a black girl with fake red straight hair. I looked again at her arms, which protruded naturally from a short-sleeved blouse (in December, yeah, it’s San Diego) and realized she was a white girl with natural straight red hair – and so many tatoos all over her arms that it made her skin look dark brown! And, for whatever, reason, her make-up was that kind of high-contrast cheap-looking stuff that the black disco queens used to wear to make their lips and eyelids gold or silver and I had just dismissed it all as a black girl with a new hairstyle. And as the skin situation dawned on me, it combined with the conversation my friend and I had been having before all the silliness had started, and I completely lost interest in The Tatooed Lady. I just wanted her out of my store.
And even though I had been perfectly-timed with my witty responses to the blonde, all I could do was glare at the redhead and offer a flat, “No.”
“No?” she echoed and glanced at me and my friend in a last attempt to look seductive.
“If you really want to be helpful,” my friend was the smooth one this time, “Get your friend some help.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “Be her sponsor, sign her up, help her get to meetings.”
“Yeah.” my friend added, “It’s too late to ‘turn her into’ an alcoholic.”
“Yeah.” the redhead acknowledged as she started to walk (no sashay) back out the door, “She’s already there.”
–G!
That is one helluva story.
I agree. That is one that demands to live on. Thank you for sharing it!
Ugh. Angry people wanting to buy beer. I remember having to deny a couple of frat-bros while to their left I could see the undercover cop pretending to be perusing the beer section. He was waiting to arrest ME, not the assholes I was dealing with. And of course, the assistant manager made sure to be unavailable so that he wouldn’t have to deal with these guys. Yeah, nothing like being thrown under the bus by everybody.
C’mon, dude. The fact that you “forgot your ID” is practically an admission of being underage. EVERYBODY knows you get carded for booze at grocery stores. And don’t tell me that the manager knows you’re legal. He won’t be the one who gets busted. And no, telling me that the elderly security guard knows you’re legal is not any better.
Strangely enough, we never got beer rushers at the store at which I worked. At least I didn’t. You’d occasionally get the ones who’d bolt during daylight hours, but only rarely. GAS rushers, sure, but almost never beer. And surprisingly, I seldom got college kids who didn’t have IDs.
But myghod, the Beer People.
You only saw them on Sundays, but you could ALWAYS count on ONE, and often you’d get as many as five or six. Every Sunday. And they came in flavors:
THE JACK SPARROW: “But WHY won’t you sell me the beer?”
“Because, sir, state law prohibits the sale of beer on Sunday before noon. Thus, to sell you the beer would be a crime. And if I commit that crime, not only I, but my boss, could get in trouble, go to jail, probably have a fine to pay, and then he would most certainly fire me, thus eliminating my income, meaning my bills go unpaid, I get thrown out of my apartment, and then I would be a homeless hobo. I must respectfully decline your proposition, given the potential consequences.”
(pause) “Yes, but WHY won’t you sell me the beer?”
THE REASONABLE ONE: “But WHY won’t you sell me the beer?”
(repeat speech seen above)
(Pause) “Why are you being such a dick?”
THE ECONOMIST: “Dude, look: I’ll just put the money here on the counter, and you can keep it all. And then I’ll go get the beer and walk out.”
“Sir, that would be selling beer, and it’s illegal.”
“NO, no, no. It’s not selling beer. I just leave the money, and I walk out with the beer. It’s TOTALLY DIFFERENT, see?”
THE NEEDY: “But I NEED the beer!”
“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t sell it to you.”
“But I NEED the beer!”
“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t sell it to you.”
“But why are you being such a dick?”
THE JEDI: (puts beer on counter) “And I’ll have a pack of Mar’boros, too.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I can sell you the smokes, but beer sales aren’t legal until noon.”
“Why not?”
“Can’t sell beer until Noon on Sundays.”
“But it’s not Sunday.”
“Yes, sir, it is.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, sir, it is.”
(multiple iterations of the last two lines)
"…why are you being such a dick?"
THE CRIMINAL: “Well, FINE, then, I’ll just TAKE the damn beer!”
“As you wish, sir. But you will be on video, and then I have to call the cops.”
"…why are you being such a dick?"
THE TOUGH GUY: “Well, FINE, then, I’ll just KICK YOUR ASS and TAKE the beer!”
(Slip hand under the counter prominently) “You can try. If you do, though, you’ll be on video, both the camera you see above, and the two hidden ones, and you don’t know where the tape is. And even if you win, I guarantee you will be in serious pain. And wanted by the cops for felony robbery.”
(pause) “Why are you being such a dick?”
THE SPECIAL AGENT: “Very good, young man. We tried to get you, but you were too smart for us. We’ll be back later to collect the tapes, but we have to take this beer as evidence.”
“I see. Can I see some ID?”
“Some what?”
“If you’re TABC agents, I presume you have identification, and I’ll need to see and Xerox it for my boss before I can let you take anything. Standard procedure for law enforcement, except for coffee and the day old doughnuts.”
“You don’t need to see our identification.”
“No, no, sir, that’s the JEDI, up more towards the top of this post. You’re the SPECIAL AGENT. And I will need to see and copy your ID before I can let you take anything.”
(Pause) “Why are you being such a…”
You are a veritable magnet for weirdos and–wait, why do I feel a strange attraction towards you??
There is an old Gahan Wilson cartoon in which an old hand is checking people out at a till while a horrified trainee in the same uniform and paper hat looks on.
The line consists of a vampire, a werewolf, a blob monster, a female superhero, a witch, and various other denizens of the night… all patiently lined up with their purchases, waiting their turn.
The old hand is saying “It’s the midnight shift, kid. You get used to it.”