Three Important Lessons

Today I learned three very important lessons :

1) Do not take a taxi cab to a pawn shop when you do not have money to pay the fare, hoping that the items you intend to sell will cover it and leave you with extra spending money. The items may be worth very, very little or even turned away because they are broken, falling apart, or incomplete, leaving you unable to pay the disgruntled taxi driver or return home.

- I learned that this has happened repeatedly to a shocking number of our patrons. Now when the local taxi companies discover that someone wants a ride to our pawn shop, they ask if that person already has cash on them and denies service to those who do not because they have been stiffed one too many times and are now taking precautions.

2) Do not repeatedly tell your granddaughter that strangers will spank her if she does not start behaving.

- A trio of woman spanning three generations came into the pawn shop today, a grandmother, her daughter, and her daughter's daughter. The granddaughter was very hyper and kept running around the pawn shop, touching things, climbing, jumping, and babbling to herself while I showed her mother and grandmother various digital cameras from a glass case. At one point, the granddaughter came over to her mother and grandmother and began trying to grab things from the glass class and even climb inside of it. The grandmother told her granddaugther that I was the boss and that I would spank her if she didn't start behaving. I was horrified. The little girl, however, was not. She continued her naughty behavior and the grandmother offered several more threats of me spanking her, all the while I was fearing someone would overhear, misunderstand the situation, and start a chain of increasingly traumatic events that would thrust me into the middle of negative news coverage, a drawn out lawsuit, and a prison sentence that had no chance of parole. I think I escaped the situation unscathed, but still. Bad, Grandma! Bad!

3) Do not store your change in a place that makes it look like it is in your underwear.

- Normally, I like it when people pay with exact change, and I would encourage anyone to do so, but only if you do not have the habit of storing your various coins stored underneath your basketball shorts in a place that makes it appear that they have been rubbing against your genitals. The man who broke this very important rule today probably had additional shorts on underneath his basketball shorts, and his coins were probably in a pocket safe from contact with his sweaty man parts, but it sure looked like he was digging around his crotch for the change he pulled out. He handed the coins to me and I looked at them with disgust, thinking "I'm touching penis money. This is so wrong." Come to think of it, I never washed my hands after that.