“Ma’am, yesterday I got gas here and then spent the night at the motel yonder. Today there is bird manure all over the back of my car. I will be using your wash buckets yonder to clean that off. I have never seen such a mess and don’t know why you people can’t do something about it!”

Do what exactly? Kill the birds? This is a rural area!

Yeah, I’ll just grab my Red Ryder 200 Shot Carbine Action Range Model Air Rifle with a compass and this thing that tells time built right in the stock…and I’ll get right on that for ya, mister. If I don’t shoot my eye out first.

Update: He just carried the now-filthy squeegee into the store, laid it on the counter where people set their food, to “prove he hadn’t left bird manure or rocks” in it. SERIOUSLY???

You call them producers of manure. I call them minions.

*headdesk*

“I’m late,” he said.

I agreed, noting privately to myself that he is, in fact, always at least five minutes late…but that he seldom admits it. The store clock, he claims, is completely inaccurate. That made his admission rather newsworthy.

“You’re late.” I agreed without inflection.

“I have a reason,” he said very importantly.

Ordinarily I tune him out. In fact, ordinarily, I’m walking out one door when he’s walking in the other. We get along a lot better that way.

But this time, I found myself unwillingly intrigued.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“RACCOONS!”

I blinked. “Raccoons.”

“In the dumpster!”

“Which dumpster?”

“My dumpster!”

“You live,” I reminded him, “in an apartment complex. You mean the dumpster there?”

“That’s what I said! There were raccoons in the dumpster!”

“And you’re late because…?”

“There was a whole family of them!”

“O-kay…” I said, still not really following. I mean, if they’d invaded his living room and held him at knife-point, I could sort of understand. But around here, raccoons and dumpsters are not unlike peanut butter and jelly. You don’t always find them together, but they aren’t exactly an unexpected combination.

“…and you’re late because…?” I prompted.

“I was trying to decide whether to call the cops.”

I stared.

“Wouldn’t you have called them?” he demanded.

“No.”

To be fair, I would, maybe, when I had a spare moment, if I’d thought about it or actually cared, have called the apartment manager/maintenance/whoever. Or, more likely, I’d have waited until the garbage truck came. Problem solved.

Heck, I had a raccoon in my backyard a month or so ago and all I did was throw a stick in its general direction and make sure it had gone over the fence before I let the dog out. It was not, I didn’t think, a matter requiring law enforcement intervention.

He wasn’t listening. He never listens, because in his world when he asks a question, you’ve already answered him according to the script inside his head. Therefore, it’s completely unnecessary for him to engage his ears. While I know I said, “no,” it’s likely that he heard, “OMG yes, for I am merely a weak and lowly woman and I am completely unequipped to cope with the scenario you have described!”

“They have shotguns,” he nodded.

I am somewhat unclear on whether he meant that the police have shotguns (although I can’t see any of them discharging weapons into a big metal bucket) or whether the raccoon family had shotguns…which would honestly have been a much more interesting story.

Hmph.

Yesterday, my koworker was late again. No mention of raccoons, but he did give the store clock an accusatory glare.

I guess things are back to normal…

...or are they?

“The Fortunas,” I told him, indicating our handy easy to read price chart posted for the customers’ convenience, “are the cheapest we have. They’re $5.50 plus tax.”

“You’re [excrement-synonym]-ing me!” he shouted, going from passive to postal with impressive speed. Clearly a kustomer without mental middle gears. “You have got to be [copulating-synonym]-[excrement-synomyn]-ing me!”

“No sir,” I wiped a fleck of spittle (not mine) away. “Wisconsin puts a really heavy tax on tobacco these days.”

“I can’t afford that!” he told me.

I waited politely. I’m not sure what he expected me to do. Offering freebies is not in the employee handbook, y’know? Nor was I particularly enchanted with him. Rabid foaming and obscenities are really not sympathy triggers in my world.

“How much are Marlboros?” he demanded.

I told him.

“Mavericks?”

I told him.

“Pall Malls?”

I told him.

“You don’t have anything cheaper?”

“I don’t have anything cheaper.”

“You can’t help me out?”

“I can’t help you out.” Usually I’ll add a personal apology to a statement like this. For some reason, I didn’t feel inclined to in this case. Maybe it was the spittle. I don’t like spittle.

“You’re serious? You’re [copulating-synonym] serious?”

“Yes, I am.”

He glared at me for an uncomfortably protracted period and finally said, “Give me a pack of Mavericks then. Full flavor, one hundreds.”

Luckily, I had those in stock, so I put them on the counter and rang up the sale.

He paid me with a fifty dollar bill.

Photo from: thehouseontherock.com

Kustomer: So we’re almost at the House on the Hill, right?

Me: Do you mean The House On The Rock? (And seriously folks, if you’re in Wisconsin and you’ve never been there, you should go. It’s an awesome place.)

Kustomer: Yeah.

Me: It’s about an hour from here.

Kustomer: But I was told it was an hour from where I was, and I’ve been driving an hour already!

Me: What road were you supposed to take to get there?

Kustomer: I don’t know.

Me: You…don’t know?

Kustomer: No.

Me: You didn’t get directions before you started out?

Kustomer: No.

Me: You’ve just been driving around?

Kustomer: Yeah.

Me: So how were you planning on finding it?

Kustomer: Aren’t there signs?

Me: Maybe occasionally, depending on if you’re going in the right direction.

Kustomer: So am I?

Me: I don’t know. I don’t know where you came from.

Kustomer: That’s not very helpful.

I sold him a map.

“Had a bunch of boy scouts from and 3 leaders from [a long way away]. So far they’ve bought 3 quarts of oil, 1 gallon of anti-freeze and 2 bottles of Radiator Stop-Leak. I don’t know, but I think if I was taking a bunch of kids that weren’t mine 3 hours from home, I would have my car checked out before I left.”

“Wait,” she says, and pushes forward a single candy bar, neatly cut from the herd. “Ring this up first. By itself.”

“I already started on the other things,” I say. “Do you want to pay for them first and then we can do that one as a separate transaction?”

“No,” she says. “I told you to ring this up first.”

With a mental shrug, I void the transaction, wait until the cash register spits out the receipt of rejection, and start over, ringing up the single candy bar as directed. She pays me with a twenty dollar bill from her right front pocket. I give her the change. She puts it in her right front pocket.

“Now the rest.” She taps her fingers impatiently on the counter.

I ring up the rest.

She reaches into her left front pocket and, you guessed it, pays me with a twenty dollar bill.

And I really, really, really want to say something.

But I don’t.

“Well, no, because–” I started, only to be cut off.

“You only have Saturday papers in the boxes out front! Did someone forget to put new ones in?”

“Today is Saturday,” I said.

He stared at me in silence for a very long moment.

Then he left.

The thing weighed a ton.

Upon investigation, I realized that some clever soul had taken their own non-subtle white garbage bag (chock-full of whatever) and rammed it into our already full enough thank-you-very-much, garbage bag. This is really freakin’ annoying, to tell you the truth. Anyway, I decided to remove the intruder first, reasoning that this would enable me to get our bag out without my needing back surgery or a Medflight or something.

So, Garbage Can – Take Two. I reached in, grabbed the white bag, gave a businesslike lift and as it cooperatively popped loose from the can to about the level of my chest, it exploded.

I’m not saying that the bottom dropped out of it. I’m saying it exploded. Because it exploded.

Plastic bags rip. I know this already from bitter experience. Too many times, I have felt the dreaded “brown goo” seeping through my shoes from a leaking garbage bag, no matter how carefully I tried to hold it at arm’s length while waddling at breakneck toward the dumpster. And Heaven forbid that I wear sandals. Really, the brown goo is everything noxious you can imagine, all condensed and pureed. Brown goo on bare skin would probably give me leprosy at the very least.

But at least I know to expect brown goo. And this wasn’t it.

Never before have I seen this level of catastrophic disintegration. And never before, in the line of duty, have I found myself liberally splattered with…

Rotten watermelon.

In a vague way, I’d be quite interested to find out if the gasses from watermelon decay can interact with the chemical compounds in plastic.

In a more immediate way, I’d really like a shower.

“Just had a girl in here who was on her way home from a picnic in Rockford, Ill. She lives on the north side of Chicago. Didn’t the Welcome to Wisconsin sign give her a clue she was going the wrong way?”

Apparently no more than going past several noteworthy Wisconsin towns, the entire city of Madison, a few prominently advertised cheese shops, a couple thousand cars with WI license plates on them, and the Wisconsin River. *sigh*

This is a clue.