Tuesday, March 22, 2011

To Mock A Bird Killing

I work at a market. In a tacky hand-painted glass stall. I have to get up at 6 am on Sunday. It is done only because I am poor. I'll be honest with you; the less-than-amazing pay, the babysitting* and the really long days suck but some of the weirdos that I meet through this crazy place make the whole thing worthwhile (that and $150 cash). After all, it's nice to have a little chortle at the oddities of others. Really really glaring oddities that keep you on the chortle all week. This is my favourite:

We sell one piece in the entire stall that is not glass. It is a pair of metal foul. One rooster and one duck. They scream class. One day a lady came up to me, presumedly to ask me about prices or how the materials are made; often people become blind to price tags if they don't really like them. Sometimes they decide to become blind to me incase I should try to push them into a sale. This must appear to be a very likely possibility given my obvious enthusiasm and sales hungry choice of career. I used to use a much more friendly approach to customers and ask about how their days were progressing but I would more often than not get a response that indicated that I had threatened to kill them with a spoon rather than ask about their day. I digress.

Instead of asking about pricing (or about my day, the bitch) this woman proceeds to tell me a story. Pointing to the aluminium friends of a feather she informs me that she used to have a best friend who was a rooster. Insert long and strange pause here. "But then I killed him''. I didn't really know what to say so I stuttered out "That's no good". The conversation continued:
Strange Rooster Killer "Of course it's not! I was very cross with him, so I locked him in the shed. It was very hot, but I was so cross that I left him there. I left him in there the whole day because I was so cross. He suffocated in the heat." She then left.

I couldn't really tell if she killed him on purpose but I knew she felt the matter was quite serious. It will always be a mystery what foul thing the bird did to make her so angry. Maybe he made a comment about her age; after all, she was no spring chicken.


*read: looking after my bosses incredibly spoilt and unlikable child- much like her mother- for free

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