the trashman

the tale of yet another weirdo

Middle shift today. Middle shifts are the most social, probably, because you run register and talk to the opener for half of the day and the closer for the other half, but when you open or close you're alone most of the day.

That is all to say that, and I'm on lunch again as I write this, I've been up front with a cashier for the past 3 and a half hours. Guy came in wearing a homemade hazmat suit: trashbag over his torso with holes for only his arms, another pulled up over his legs, taped in the middle; huge rubber kitchen gloves on pulled up to his elbows, and a set of latex gloves pulled over those. He had a CPAP mask on, with the tube dangling through a hole in the top trashbag, with a coffee filter on the end.

He was also wearing a bicycle helmet. I can't tell you if he was riding a bicycle (good god, I hope not), or if it was just in case his costume threw him off balance, but he was prepared either way.

Dude ran up to me and yelled something I couldn't understand, because his entire body was covered in nonsense. I asked if he could repeat it and he threw his hands up in front of his face presumably to defend himself from flying saliva, even though there was a giant plexiglass shield recently installed between me and him, and I was wearing a mask. He ran off without saying another word. He came back up to the front with his arms full of peroxide. There must have been a dozen bottles. He ran up to the other cashier's register and asked her to scan them from 6 feet away, which she couldn't do because the scanning gun can't focus that far away. He got pretty mad about this, but I still don't know how it was going to end, because at that point my coworker coughed. The guy was physically thrown backward by this, dropping half of the bottles of peroxide, screaming some incoherent nonsense. He then turned and ran at full speed for the door, dropping the rest of the bottles as he ran. The door didn't open fast enough, so he collided with the edge of it, smashing it mostly off its rail, and sending him tumbling into the entryway. When he stood back up, the bottom trashbag tore off and he stumbled out the second door shrieking.

When the repairman corporate's sending out gets here next week he'll have to fix the door too, apparently. In the meantime we're just gonna leave it open and hope the security system doesn't go off because of it.

Why the fuck is the world ending?