Work Stories: Episode 73: Hello There

Previously on Work Stories, I wrote about a guy who tried to scan his ticket at the televisions, thinking that they were the black box that I had said to scan at.  It’s still one of the few times I’ve been completely wordless because of something that a person has done while trying to get into the museum that I work at.  It was unbelievable.  Four big television screens.  That’s where he thought the scanner was, even though I had pointed at the scanner sitting on the counter.  I don’t know what gets into people’s minds sometimes.

I’ve got another story for you this week about another strange encounter at work.  We get crazy and weird people coming up to our ticketing area all the time.  That’s how I end up with half of the stories I tell in the Work Stories.  They approach, they act really strange, and then we part ways.  They think nothing at all of the time they walked up to that guy selling tickets at one of the many attractions in Niagara Falls.  I think about the experience quite a bit and then write about it so other people will know what I’ve gone through.  That’s how it works.

Let it be known that I was not the person selling tickets when this story happened.  I had just gone into our lobby and was awaiting my turn to sit behind the cash register, but when this happened, it was a coworker that was selling tickets.  I just witnessed the entire thing from a front row position.

At around 11pm, a man walks up to the counter of our ticket booth.  He smells of alcohol, but he’s well enough composed that my coworker decides that he can go in.  The man asks if we have any alcohol in there, as a joke.  It’s a joke we hear all the time and, although I explain almost everything in the Work Stories, I’m not going to explain the joke.  It will make a dull thudding sound in my head like every time someone asks that question.  My coworker awkwardly smiles at the guy.

This guy then asks for a ticket to our museum.  This is when my coworker tries to down-sell the guy to stop someone drunk from entering, without outright refusing entry.  It’s something that we have all figured out how to do in order to stop people like this guy from going in and either throwing up or passing out.  He tells the guy that this is a museum and there’s a lot of reading inside.  The guy looks at him questioningly.  My coworker repeats that the museum is filled with reading and asks the guy if he minds having to read.

The drunk man’s response was one of the best responses I have ever heard to this question.  He said “I read something once when I was in grade 3.”  Then he looks from my coworker to me, and back to my coworker.  He is smiling about what he just said.  I’ll admit that I started laughing when he said that.  I found it funny.  What can I say?

My coworker looks at him and says the price of a ticket to the museum.  The guy pays and then walks inside.  My coworker and I just look at each other.  I don’t think my coworker has dealt with people like this at our museum until now.  He looked confused about what had occurred.  I took it as another in a long line of dumb, funny, weird things to happen where I work.

The drunken man was in and out of the museum quick enough that my coworker could not find him two minutes later.  Talk about a waste of money.  He did leave a funny memory though.  I thank him for that.

That’s it for this installment of the Work Stories.  I’m not going to say that it’s this week’s installment because I haven’t been putting these up weekly for a while.  I want to, but sometimes I forget.  I end up with other things going on.  Between work, Sunday “Bad” Movies, and other writing I’ve been doing for other people, this has fallen by the wayside a little bit.  I’m sorry about that.  I know there is one person out there who wants to read these and enjoys by rambling.  Anyway, I’ll be back at some point with another installment of the Work Stories.

Until then, I’m gonna go fondle my sweaters.