A month or two back, my squad leader, during our weekly squad meeting, advised us to be wary of seals if we happened to go jogging on the beach.
Apparently he was jogging along the beach one night, and got too close to some seal’s territory, and the seal proceeded to bark angrily and chase after him. This sounds funny, but keep in mind that this airman was not out of shape at all, and was still in no danger of outrunning this angry aquatic mammal. He thinks the only thing that saved him was that he left the seal’s territory and the seal decided to leave it at that.
That said, the deer a few seconds later was another issue for him, but he managed to successfully avoid that guy too. It was an interesting night for him, but hey, we knew we were signing on for a life of danger when we enlisted.
When I was in college, I had a part-time job delivering flowers. Every year near Xmas, this little old lady ordered flowers delivered to a grave. The catch was that the deliverer had to sing a couple of Xmas carols at the grave (she paid extra for this). I suppose I could’ve just said I did, because nobody would’ve known, but I didn’t have the heart to do that.
I used to run the print shop in a heavy equipment company, and one of our salesmen referred his girlfriend’s hair salon employees to me for printing up their business cards.
Two different worlds here: one world is good ol’ boys who smoke cigars, wear John Deeree caps, and deal in construction. The other world is hair salon employees that consisted of flambouyantly gay guys and persnickety fag hags. Both worlds occasionally collided and the results were interesting.
One such salonist wanted his name spelled “Roi Parquere” instead of “Roy Parker.” He was ambivalent of which color paper to use, and told me to slap him if he got too silly. I tried not to get too embarassed whenever he would squeal at a particular design, and the sound of his excitement would carry to neighboring offices. Probably neighboring buildings as well.
Side note: I would typically carry customers’ purchases out front for them and load them in their cars if they were ladies. The office manager would always tease me about it.
When Roi finally left, the office manager came to my office and asked in her precocious southern belle voice, “Eric, are you gonna carry out his stuff for him?”
I worked at K-Mart in high school. Learned a lot about humanity there. Like the time I was carrying a fairly heavy box with some kind of glass vase or something through the store for a customer, when this lady comes flying around the corner pushing a cart and nails me right in the beanbag with it. I actually managed to hold onto the box and just stand there till it stopped hurting. The lady spat ‘Watch where you’re going’ and took off.
Or the time it was 9:30 on Christmas Eve (we closed at 9), every single register was open with a line 15 deep, and there’s a guy in the back carrying two cases of beer screaming about what assholes we were cuz he needed to get home.
Or the crazy lady who would regularly come into the store and start yelling about how they just threw her out of the #store_down_the_street cuz she was epileptic. She would eventually be thrown out.
Or the two kids I caught in the toy section who had opened up two bb guns and were running around shooting at each other and anyone else in the area. I was asking them to give me back the guns, when their mother showed up and proceeded to yell at me for giving them such dangerous guns and wouldn’t listen to a single word I said. She grabbed her kids and stormed out.
I worked at a small library in college, which was mostly boring, but occasionally we’d get some idiots. One night a guy came into the library, up to the front desk I was working at, and threw a folded up piece of paper at me saying ‘My teacher said we had to do a research paper’. I unfolded the piece of paper, read some of it, handed it back to him, and said ‘The law library is in the building across from this one.’
Probably my biggest :eek: moment in my Montana bookstore was this one, which took place about 4 years ago. The customer was wearing a nondescript shirt, camo pants, boots, and a hoodie.
Customer: Do you have any books about the Unabomber?
Me: Not in stock, but I can order them for you. Let me pull up a list of what’s available (pause, then I turn the computer screen to face him, with a list of about a half-dozen books)
Customer: I have this one, and this one, and this one. Hmm. Can you order me those two?
Me: Certainly. Let me get your phone number, and we’ll call you when they come in.
Customer: I don’t have a phone. I’ll just stop by every few days until they get here.
Dang, folks is crazy. It’s been many years since I’ve worked with The Public, and it’s both disturbing and comforting to know that there are still a lot of full-on batshit nutballs out there.
I worked for way too long as a teller at a bank branch about a quarter of a mile from a major mental hospital in the south. This branch was also in a pretty bad neighborhood, and we got a LOT of weird stuff going through our lobby. We were all cautioned to be sure to always lock our cars as the clients from the mental hospital would just stroll off the grounds and come over and have poop fests in the unlocked cars (this happened more than once). Mostly though, the folks from the hospital weren’t the real fruitloops - it was the regular, commercial customers (and a few homeless guys) who provided most of the entertainment:
One of the guys who worked at the hardware/sporting goods store up the street would occasionally pull a gun in the lobby. Sometimes it was an actual pistol, sometimes it was his dick. We employees (4 young women and one guy, the manager) used to set up pools and bet on when the next “show” would be and which weapon would be displayed.
Another regular customer at the drive up window would act otherwise completely normal, but always included a personal note to the teller. When I had drive up duty the notes usually said something along the lines of “Lest (sic) have sex”. I’d routinely unfold the note, read it and give him a :dubious: , then process the deposit or whatever, we’d thank each other and he’d drive off.
There were a couple of homeless guys, Little Man and Rabbi, who lived most of the time on bank property. Towards the end of the month we would hire them to do stuff like pick up trash and pull weeds and stuff; at the beginning of the month was when they got their Social Security checks and they’d be steady drunk for as long as the money lasted. One time Rabbi acquired a chicken and a rabbit (both live) which he carried around in cages. The two guys plus chicken and rabbit were in the lobby and had some kind of disagreement which ended up with Little Man opening the cages and letting the livestock out. I will never forget as long as I live the sight of all of us - employees and customers - trying to catch the poor animals and get them back in the cages. They did NOT want to go back in those cages, and put up a heck of a messy fight. They were fast, too. It was a completely I Love Lucy experience. The damn chicken pecked me, too.
I kind of miss the benign crazy folks, but there were times when people would go completely off, like if they got to the bank like 5 minutes after we closed on Friday night and needed to cash a check for the weekend (this was in the days before ATMs). I once saw a guy pound his head repeatedly, like 10 - 12 times, against the outside brick wall of the bank because he couldn’t get his check cashed. He knocked himself out and I had to call the paramedics (who also didn’t cash his check).
But the behavior that really takes the cake for me was one time at a different bank when we had a bomb scare. We’d received a phone threat, and as the Operations Officer, I had to go look for the device. Unlike most bomb threats (we got about one per month, on average), this time I actually found something. It was a “suspicious package” in one of the drive up lanes, pretty close to the building. I had to evacuate the building and the drive up while the police/fire/FBI/Highway Patrol/bomb squad/Ghostbusters were on their way, and this turned out to be ridiculously difficult to do. Of course I didn’t want to panic people, so I started out saying that we had a situation and everyone needed to leave the area. No. bleeping. response. Everybody still in line or asking stupid questions about car loans. I escalated, but it wasn’t until I got up and stood on my desk in the middle of the lobby and SHOUTED that they were in immediate danger that people started leaving. Actually, I don’t think it was me that made them leave, it was probably the teller who started crying out of fear that made them pay attention. It didn’t turn out to be a bomb; it was just flares and some electronics stashed in a paper bag to look like a bomb. But it was pretty neat to see the bomb squad explode it anyway.
