Work Stories: Episode 25: The Regulars

Previously on Work Stories, I told you all about the time that a balloon machine almost burned my coworker’s face off.  That’s something.  I also think that it was one of the better written Work Stories.  I’m proud of it.

This week I’m going to do something a little different.  This isn’t going to be so much a story about what happened at work.  Since this is the 25^th Work Story, I thought that I would give you guys and gals a taste of some of the people that I see while I work.  I don’t mean that I’m going to write about irate customers or people I’ve only seen once.  I would like to devote this 25^th post to the regulars.  These are people that might be homeless or might be crazy.  They just happen to also hang around the street that I work on.

First up is a guy who, for the sake of this post, I am going to call Leland.  Leland is the most frequent guest to the street.  You can always hear him out on the curb shaking a cup for change.  Yes.  I am writing about a beggar.  Leland has one thing that singles him out among beggars.  He has no legs and he sits in a wheelchair.  I guess that’s two things, but they go together to make the whole.  Leland has been around for the two years I have worked at the museum.  He is the constant.  He is also the only one whose name I know.

The next regular that I would like to quickly write about is Stalker Girl.  Who is Stalker Girl?  I wrote about her about a year and a half ago on this very blog.  She was a creepy girl who was stalking me.  That is why I call her Stalker Girl.  She approached me one day wearing fluorescent pink pants, and started making fun of fat people.  Then she told me she had seen me around a few times.  I started to get freaked out a little bit.  That was when she asked if I was working the job in order to support my child.  She was a weird one.

Moving on, we come to Creepy Tongue Guy.  This guy is really creepy.  One night while one of my coworkers and I were walking up to our parking lot, he was ahead of us.  He stopped, turned around, and slowly rolled his tongue out of his mouth.  We immediately crossed the street.  Last week, he walked past that same coworker and stuck his tongue out at her, Gene Simmons style.  I don’t even know how to react to that other than to write this about him.

I’ll leave you with a fourth person.  There are more than four regulars, but I’ll save some of them for another time.

The fourth regular that I’m going to write about is Could Get A Job.  Could Get A Job is Leland’s main competition.  Well, he was last year.  I haven’t seen him since around Christmas.  He was a guy who wore decent enough clothes, and looked like he could easily get a job.  Instead, he grabbed a cup and begged for change on the side of the street.  Leland would always go shoo him away, and Could Get A Job would move somewhere else on the street.  Maybe he was homeless, and that’s why he couldn’t get a job.  He didn’t look homeless though.

So those are four people I’ve seen on a regular basis while I was working at the museum.  I know this wasn’t the best writing.  I am sorry for that.  I just wanted to get some of that out there.  I’m not sorry for that.

Until next time, there's a lot of beauty in ordinary things. Isn't that the point?