WET FLOOR

Oh, the unexpected pleasures of working in a pawn shop. There really is no telling what the hell is going to happen, and today is undeniable proof of that. Today, while I was busily working hard for my humble wages in the back area, a co-worker of mine asked me where the WET FLOOR sign was located. I responded that I wasn't sure. Unprovoked, this co-worker informed me why the sign was needed. A customer had cut himself on our of our swords and had bled on the floor.

I couldn't believe what I'd just heard--mostly because all of the swords I'd come in contact with at the pawn shop hadn't been what you'd consider sharp in the slightest. I am not exaggerating when I say that a butter knife would be sharper than most of these things. This in mind, I asked how badly this customer had cut himself (imagining a scratch which would be easily remedied with a band-aid). Consider my surprise when I was informed that he had cut himself badly enough that there was a pool of blood on the floor and that there were also bloody footprints leading away from it.

I was so excited that I would have knocked over my co-worker to rush to the scene of the mayhem to take it all in before it had been cleaned up if guilt hadn't quickly set in and quieted my morbid excitement. How unprofessional, how immature, and, most importantly, how insensitive it would be for me to make an appearance on the showroom floor for the sole purpose of gawking. So, to make it appear as if I had more noble intentions, I offered to find the WET FLOOR sign for my co-worker. This took all of two seconds to find and then I was free to hide my shameful interest by pretending to be nothing more than a helpful employee.

When I went out to the floor, I found the customer in the sword section with a mop in one hand and a bloody paper towel wrapped around the other. The size of the pool of blood on the floor was impressive. It must have measured no less than two feet by one foot. And the strangest thing about it all was that the customer insisted on cleaning up his own blood. He awkwardly pushed and dragged the mop over his blood until it had almost been smeared into nothingness. I set the WET FLOOR sign up in front of the blood patch and silently wished he would stop touching our mop and getting blood on it.

In all honesty, I wasn't surprised to see which customer had cut himself. He was one of our regulars, and a fairly strange and rude one at that. A while ago, he had come into the store to sell some items but was unimpressed by the offer we gave him. Rejecting our offer, he responded by asking "Do I look gay?" and then informing us that he didn't "want to get f&#%ed up the a$$!" before grabbing up his items of our counter and storming out. Then, the other day, I saw him preparing for battle with one of our swords. He was swinging it around his head and out in front of him and jabbing it through the air and tilting it from side to side with no sign of self-consciousness for being so silly while in a public place. Then, earlier today, before he had cut himself, he played a bass guitar very loudly and very poorly for a very long time. Thus, all of my encounters with this kid were memorable in the most unfortunate ways.

After the young man had finished his attempt at one-handedly mopping up his own blood (there were streaks of red everywhere), I carefully took the mop from him. As I had predicted, there were smears of blood on the mop handle and I carried it very carefully to the back room. The floor wasn't totally clean and I knew that we needed to mop it a second time, but I didn't think rinsing out the mop head was a good idea since it would get his blood in our mop bucket. After speaking to the head manager of the store (for whom I felt so badly because she was beside herself with worry about lawsuits, medical bills, future incidents, etc), we decided to throw the mop head away. I promptly put it in a plastic bag, taking great pains to make sure that none of the dangly threads of the mop head touched anything, and disposed of it.

The bleeding customer was then brought through the back (which I'm sure he found exciting since it was extremely cluttered with all kinds of wonderful things) into the employee bathroom where he washed off his wound and redressed it.

Apparently, the customer was very calm and indifferent throughout the entire ordeal. He said it was no big deal and he insisted that he didn't need to go to the hospital to see if he needed stitches. I would have initially thought he was trying to save face, but I seriously think he was that strange. There is no shame in going to the hospital for stitches (for which the pawn shop would have gladly paid), that is, unless you are a psycho! This customer even roamed around the store for another half hour browsing as if nothing had happened, his wounded hand clenched the entire time. No, he gave no indication that anything out of the ordinary had happened. He just kept on keeping on, listening to his blaring screamo music in his headphones as we cleaned and sanitized with great, great care.