The Things Customers Are Willing To Tell Me

I try to be a good person, but there are many times when I feel cranky and just don't want to play nice with strangers. I'd rather ignore them and go about my business without being bothered. Unfortunately, this fierce desire for solitude usually occurs while at work when I'm forced to put on a happy face for an endless string of customers. When in these moods, my face is cemented in a stern expression and my voice is hardened with unquestionable surliness, but lately I've been playing a little game that I have titled: Reconnaissance Small Talk. This is, as the name suggests, making small talk with customers in hopes of them telling me something outrageous. The funny thing is that I usually win this one sided and slightly immoral game. It's amazing how little interest you need to show in order to open a flood gate of information.

For example, one woman told me all about how she had lost her job after working at a local hospital for over twenty years when she fell and broke her wrist. She had been a secretary and her healed wrist just didn't allow her to perform like she used to. This caused her employer to heartlessly label her unable to do her job properly and let her go without offering any compensation or type of severance package. This somehow lead into the then recent event of her daughter moving away to the local community college and how the apartment she had moved into had been filthy. In her devoted motherhood, the woman spent hours cleaning the apartment for her daughter (where the daughter was at the time, I have no clue, but it didn't sound like the recently unemployed mother had any help) and then complained to the office but was not compensated for her time.

One man haplessly mentioned that he was going to head out on vacation. When I asked him why he didn't seem too happy about it, he told me that he was heading to his brother's wedding. Now, the only reason I ever go to weddings is to eat food and cake--I mean--to show my support for the newly wedded couple--yeah--to show support . . . forget it, we all know it's all about the food. Anyway, I was going to say that at least there would be plenty to eat, but the man interrupted my joke and stormed ahead to inform me that he thought his brother was rushing into the marriage much too quickly. Apparently, this man's brother and his fiance had only known each other for three months and this was not a sufficient amount of time in his opinion. I might agree with this judgement in most cases, but my parents married quickly and they're still going strong after thirty years. There's also the fact that many courtships in my religion don't seem to last much longer than three months. Anyway, I wasn't totally disgusted with the brief engagement because I'd seen plenty of marriages that began that way and are still thriving today. I would have offered some comfort that it could all work out, but the man continued on to divulge that his brother was going to have a camouflage wedding. I had never heard of such a thing, but my imagination burst forth with images of a bucktooth bride in a camouflage dress and a groom with a mullet donning a fuzzy moss tuxedo amongst a milling crowd of barefooted people discussing Nascar. The man, however, interrupted this slackjawed daydream by telling me that he was upset with his brother because he wouldn't let him bring his dog to the wedding. The man just didn't see why he couldn't bring a dog to a camouflage wedding, but, of course, the answer is very obvious. Because having a dog in attendance just wouldn't be classy.

Another moment of greatness was when I noticed that a man had a large gash across one of his fingers between his first and middle knuckles. He was actually rubbing on hand sanitizer at the moment, making the wound look especially moist and disgusting. I asked the man if he'd gotten into a fight. As it turns out, the only fight he had was with gravity while upon a ladder. As you could imagine, he lost the battle with this eternal law of nature, but as you probably didn't anticipate, he fell into a dumpster and scraped his hand open. I have since repeatedly played a dramatization of this event in my mind.

On the other hand, there are some people who are not so willing to talk. For example, I once handed a woman a pawn contract along with a yellow pen so that she could finalize the transaction with her signature. This woman, however, stared down at the pen and harshly demanded that I give her a different one. Taken off guard, I asked her to repeat herself. Without removing her eyes from the pen, she told me she needed a different color of pen. Recognizing something ridiculous, I asked her why. She responded that yellow was an unlucky color. I continued staring at her while she continued to stare at the pen as if it was a rattlesnake about to strike and asked "Really?" She said it was and I gave her a green pen. I wanted to push this topic further, but I dropped it. The way the woman was acting made me fearful that inquiring deeper into her superstitions would get me stabbed, most likely with an unlucky yellow pen.