Service with a Smile

Have you ever had a job where you have to deal with customers on a regular basis? I commend you for your service especially if you can actually do it with a smile. Service with a smile is basically like trying to smile while someone is kicking you in the knees.

Must....try....to smile!

For those of you who don't know I work at a graveyard. It is government run and anytime you say you work for the government in any way people automatically assume you work for them and this gives them a right to yell at you for anything they don't find aesthetically pleasing. It happens so often in my job that I got to the point of almost running away when people would walk towards me while I was working.

Typical work day

 It was the week after memorial day and we had just thrown away all the leftover rotting flowers and cleared all the headstones, which is county policy. It was the end of a long day and my boss told me to go park all the vehicles so that we could go home. I hopped into the mule and started backing it up when I saw a red flash behind me as a truck had cut me off and trapped me in. I heard loud squawking coming from the truck. My first reaction was that these were mobsters here to "whack" me for getting out of line. But the squawking I heard could only be one thing....retired people.

 

The scourge of the earth

If it were mobsters I wouldn't have heard a thing.....ever again. I turned around to see two short old ladies faces red with fury yelling at the tops of their lungs at me with clenched fists. Now, this is normal actually for my job so I immediately tried to figure out what the situation was. They made it readily apparent that we had thrown away something that belonged to them. I being the noble worker I was at the time recited the county code that we were too throw everything away in the graveyard. This made them angrier and they started screaming things even louder like "you have no idea who we are" and "you wait and see what we can do to you." Their threats got so realistic I started second guessing myself on my previous hypothesis about them being mobsters was. Eventually my boss came out after the two old ladies had basically gone into full detail on how in the old days they used to shoot grave robbers.

Ya feelin lucky punk? Well do ya?

He calmed them down and promised that the county would reimburse them for their thrown away goods which ended up to being around $2.99 No that's not a decimal placement mistake I basically had my life threatened for just under 3 dollars not including tax.