Work Stories: Episode 64: I Saw the Sign

Previously in Work Stories, I wrote about a guy who was preaching on the corner of the street when I went to go get a lunch.  I see people handing out pamphlets and cards about religion all the time.  That’s something that happens in the area where I work.  But I had never seen a guy with a microphone and speaker preaching about his God on a street corner before.  I know that some of you might be thinking “I see that on a daily basis” or “I am that guy.”  That doesn’t matter to me.  This was an experience I had never had before.

This week I will share with you another experience I have had in my working life.  I have experienced a bunch of little oddities by working in tourism.  That’s where all of this stuff comes from.  Working in the tourism industry, you see a lot of strange stuff.  When people go on vacation, they turn their brains off.  The brainless meandering leads to some interesting things for us bystanders to witness.  It gives me a deep back catalogue of Work Stories to choose from.  Here’s what I chose this week.

A couple of weeks ago, I was manning the cash register at the museum that I work at.  That’s no different than usual.  It’s a duty I’m used to doing at my job.  I wait for people to come in.  I sell them tickets.  They go into the museum.  It’s as easy as that.  It’s a simple thing, really.  It also gives me a great view of the things that are going on in the street.  A couple of weeks ago, I got one of those great views.  It is one that will always make me chuckle when I think about it.

Due to the cold that we’ve been experiencing lately (Polar Vortexes, you know?), most of our doors were closed.  We had two of them open so that people could venture in and out of our lobby, but the rest were all closed.  These doors are big panes of glass with a metal border.  So, I guess they could be considered windows.  Anyway, most of them were closed.  I’ve said that already.

So I’m sitting there minding my own business when I see this guy come strolling down the street.  He’s all by himself.  He’s all alone.  He walks up to our doors.  Not the open ones, mind you, but the closed ones along the street.  He walks right up to them and stares inside.  You would think that with our four televisions on the wall, he would be staring at them.  But he wasn’t.  Instead, he was staring at me, sitting there behind the cash register.  He was trying to look into my soul.

I’m not exactly sure how I reacted at the time.  I was a little freaked out that this guy that I didn’t know and had never seen before would walk up to our doors and start staring at me.  It was really weird.  He wouldn’t take his eyes off of me.

Eventually he did.  He stopped staring at me.  I watched him leave, being sufficiently creeped out.  He turned and began to walk away as fast as possible, only to walk directly into the sign that was beside him.  I burst out laughing as he acted like he hadn’t hit it and sped away.  Clearly, he had hit it though.  He had hit it hard.  The sign had come out of the frame that was holding it.  That’s how hard he had hit it.

I went out and popped the sign back into place.  The guy was at the next street corner walking away quickly.  I kept laughing, and had a good chuckle for the rest of my shift.  I hadn’t seen someone walk into the sign like that before, but now I had.  And it was funny.

That’s this week’s Work Story.  Once again, I’m sorry but not sorry that it’s a day late.  I don’t think there is anyone who anxiously awaits these things.  I was watching the Canada vs. USA Olympic men’s hockey game.  Can you blame me for watching that before writing this?  Then I had to go to work.  So there’s that too.  Next week, there won’t be a hockey game at noon, so I should be able to get the Work Story up on time.  We’ll see.

Until then, Penny caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!