All In a Day's Work

As I've mentioned several times before, I work in retail. Men's clothing, to be exact. I have become so blatantly disenchanted with my current employment situation that most of my workdays are spent zoned out in a corner, self-narrating the mediocre events of my shifts--that, and discovering new and better ways in which security tags can be used as tools for self-mutilation.

So the other day, while I'm standing by the Tommy Hilfiger ties, stabbing myself in the ear with a ticketing gun, a youngish, slightly overweight gentleman walks up beside me. He feels it needs to be said, in all of his articulate glory, that "It's daym hot in herre. Why those people you werk fer act like it's freggin' twunty dugrees outside? I ullready get dizzy; it don't need to be so daym hot." I shrug my shoulders, nod in agreement, and ask if he needs help finding anything in particular. He relays that he has to try a few items on before making any final decisions, and so I point to the nearest fitting room. Now, at just that slight complaint, I already get the feeling that my sweaty friend just might be a hypochondriac, a complainer, or just a plain, out and out, giant baby. I forget about him after a moment and, for one reason or another, make my way over to a register located directly beside the fitting room our friend now finds himself in. He emerges finally, most likely sweatier than before, and finds me once again. He would like to purchase these pants, please, but also:
"Who cleans y'all's fittin' rooms?"
"I do. I'm sorry if there was a mess; I haven't been able to..."
"I mean, they'rr prrtty clean, but they's tons o' needles all ov'r the place in 'em."

He's referring to shirt pins. You see, we use shirt pins to keep our finer-made dress shirts nice and neat. These pins find their way all over the floor when careless customers ravage a shirt's packaging. Ravenous dogs, those ones be.

I look at his face and can tell that he feels as though he just escaped from a torture chamber coffin full of spikes.

"I see. Yes, well... those are shirt pins, not needles. The janitors don't vacuum."

Again, he was obviously well perturbed and made nervous at this point... He didn't like him no needleses.

"Well, they's all overr the place. I was tryin' not to step anywheres much."

That is all I can take. They can have my job. They can execute me, if that's what it takes: I am going to subtly mock this man and there is nothing anyone can do to steal this last hope of self-amusement away from me.

"Well, we're extremely lucky that pins don't know how to jump, eh?"
A well thought out "Yeah" was his response.

I continue my sales clerk duties and begin bagging his pants.

"What in the HELL is THAT?!" he cries distressedly as he bends over to pick something up from the floor nearby, and then hands me the new object of his vexation.

I look down to see what we in the biz' refer to as a 'Henry hanger'. This is a shirt hanger that has two wire sides, one on each shoulder end, to allow a place to hold both a shirt and a pair of pants. We put these on the fronts of racks in order to display outfits. I laugh when he hands it to me in such a manner.

"That's just a hanger."
"Somebody's gunna get hert with that jus' layin' arround ontha floor! Look at how sharp that dang thing is!"
"Yes; you're right. It's really quite dangerous; I don't know who on earth would have left that there. Thank you; I'll put it away before somebody hurts themselves."

As he walked down the escalator I half-expected him to begin wailing in fear. No such luck, however. He was a big boy for at least that long.

This is my life; you're welcome to it.