Work Stories: Episode 51: The Bag

Previously on Work Stories, I wrote about the time where the lighting tower almost collapsed at a concert I was working at.  It was a dangerous situation, but everyone and everything made it out fine.  I lived to see another day, and to write Work Stories years down the line.  You get to read these stories because I lived through them.  These are my life experiences at work.  They are on this blog for people to see.  Today, I will be sharing another one.  What will it be?  Even I don’t know yet.

I have now decided what I’m going to write about.  This story is one from this past summer of working at the museum that I work at.  The reason that I think it is a fitting one for right now is the fact that this past weekend, I received an update that only brought the story into my mind again.

Here’s what happened.  As I’ve said before, our parking lot is not the closest thing to our workplace.  We have to walk three blocks to get to the parking lot from work.  Or to get to work from the parking lot.  Either way, it’s a three block walk.  There is a lot of stuff to walk by on the way.  Haunted houses, arcades, restaurants, wax museums.  There are also some hotels and motels along the way.  This story involves one of the hotels that I had to pass on the trek to the parking lot.

We closed for the night, probably around 2:30 in the morning.  This is significant because it means that all of the bars have just closed down for the night.  Last call is at 2am.  So on the way to the parking lot, we encounter a lot of the freshly drunken people.  I’m not quite sure why I’m including this part.  It’s not all that relevant to the story.  I’ll leave it in here anyway because why not.

On the way to the parking lot that night, we approached the bars.  The bars were flooded with blue and red lights.  The police were all over the place.  Maybe they were breaking up some sort of a fight.  You know, drunken people can sometimes get rowdy.  We walked toward the nearest intersection to the police cars, which happened to be right next to them.  On one corner was a Days Inn, and from the intersection, we could see that it was where the police were.  They had the area taped off.  Clearly, it wasn’t just a fight.

We turned, hoping to cut through the parking lot of the magic show, next door to the Days Inn.  As we turned the corner, my coworker said the words that might stay etched in my mind forever.  “I see a black bag in the Days Inn parking lot.”  This could mean a few different things.  Was there a bomb scare?  Was there a death?  Was there a robbery?  It could have been any of these things.

I went home that night a little bit shaken.  I didn’t know what I had walked past.  I didn’t know how close I had come to danger.  What if I had gone by that area twenty minutes earlier?  What would I have seen or maybe been involved in?  I don’t know, but it shook me up a little bit.

Cut to this past week when I’m at work with a different coworker.  This coworker had been away for four or five months.  He brought up a stabbing that had happened a few months back.  I asked if it happened at the Days Inn up the street, and he said yeah.  That’s how I found out what had happened that night.  Now I know that I was that close to a fatal stabbing.

I don’t have much more to say about that experience.  It’s a moment in my life, and the last moments of someone else’s.  It’s always a strange thing, being that close to a death.  Next week’s Work Story will be something brighter.  Something more cheery.

Until then, I wanna be Kyle. I knew this guy at camp. He was maybe 13. He got *two* girls pregnant, man. *Two* girls pregnant. Yea, Kyle.