Work Stories: Episode 66: Wash that Mouth

Previously on Work Stories, I don’t know what I wrote about.  It was three weeks ago.  I meant to take a one week break, then forgot to write the Work Story the second week.  So here we are.  Three weeks after the last Work Story and I’ve forgotten what it was about.  I’ll check right now.  It looks as though my previous Work Story involved that time when I was walking through the parking lot at work and someone offered me free pizza.  That definitely sounds like something that I would write.  This week, you’re going to get something completely different again because I’m going to give you something that isn’t about parking lot pizza.

What am I going to write about?  That’s always the question that I have to answer before I get down to telling the story that I mean to tell.  I never know which story I want to write about on a given week.  There are lots of pointless Work Stories to tell.  It’s all about deciding which one I feel like sharing.  This week, I think I’ll go with an interesting person I saw one morning walking down the street.  Does that sound like a plan to you?  It sounds like a plan to me.

I tend to get more day shifts during the off season than I do during the summer touristy times.  I’m not sure why that is.  Maybe I’m a more dependable person for being at work until 3 in the morning.  That could be why I am on mostly night shifts throughout the summer season.  The good thing about the night shifts are that I get a lot of strange stories to tell about the things I’ve seen.  You’ve already seen me write about the sex van.  I wrote about the murder up the street, and dirty Michael Myers, I believe.  I’m not sure if I wrote about the girls holding each others' boobs, or the drunk girl who hit on me while her friend passed out on a counter outside of our lobby.  I know I didn’t write about the bongo playing people.  There are lots of stories about night shift working.  But there are also some good day shift ones.

When the summer ends, I end up with the day shifts that I hadn’t been getting over the summer.  This week’s Work Story comes from one of those day shifts, and it’s a memory that I can’t shake because of how odd it was.  It’s one of those moments where you see something and wonder if you actually saw what you saw, and there are other people who were with you who saw the same thing.  So, you either collectively hallucinated it, or it actually happened.

My supervisor was manning the cash register at the time, but the manager and I were up there talking to him.  What we were talking about has been long forgotten.  It’s not important anyway.  What is important is what we all saw while we were talking.  A man came stumbling down the sidewalk.  He was wearing a trench coat, holding a metal lunch pail, and drinking mouthwash.  He stopped at the parking meter and fished for money with his fingers.  He continued down the street while we all stared in awe.

All three of us looked at each other, disbelieving what we just saw.  My manager went out to the street to watch the man continue on down the hill the street is on.  Apparently, when he reached the bottom and tried to go down a set of stairs, he fell down.  That happened.

After the man was out of sight, we all separated.  I was on cash register duty a little later when the man returned.  This time he was ascending the hill that is our work street.  Things were a little bit different this time.  Instead of drinking mouthwash like ha had been when I first saw him, the man was now smoking a cigar.  He still had the trench coat, lunch pail, and was still trying to fish money out of the parking meters.  He was wobbling all around the sidewalk like a drunk.  Obviously due to the mouthwash that he had been drinking.  I was the only person who saw his return trip.

I told my supervisor about seeing this guy again.  The supervisor, in the way he always does because I’ve gained the reputation, says “All the strange things happen when you’re working.”  It is semi-true.  Most of the strange happenings at work do happen during my shifts.  I must be a magnet for that sort of thing.

That’s this week’s Work Story.  Some of you have been waiting for this for three weeks.  I hope that this installment satisfied your need for a Work Story.  I’ll try to be back again next week with another Work Story.  I can’t guarantee anything, but I can try as hard as I can.

Until then, outta my way, stool!