It was this past Sunday that an older man, some train overpass resident who obviously had no intention of being a customer, walked in. He had the same look of dire pleasantness I’ve come to know and resent from the typical homeless Augusta resident. It’s the same look you would see on a flight attendant who’s responding to your concern about the lightning bolt you just saw remove one of the engines from the wing, or on the the nurse who has interrupted your consultation with your doctor in order to invite him out of the room and tell him about the flock of undead owls wreaking havoc in the maternity ward. He wanted to know if we would allow him to plug something in to see if it worked. The average person in my position (sitting behind a woman trying to tattoo a tribal scorpion containing her boyfriends name across her lower back) probably would have denied his request using a sentence starting with the words “God-DAMMIT!!!”. But, as usual, the stunned disbelief from actually witnessing the decline of modern society led me to approve his request…

Not surprisingly, the item he wanted us to power for him was none other than the un-transportable TV from the previous night / asshole. According to the TV’s new owner, it was received as payment for helping it’s former “owner” fix the flat tire on his truck (you know, the one he couldn’t use to carry it earlier? Hmmmm…). Equally unsurprising was the fact that the TV didn’t work. I offered the poor gentleman my deepest condolences as I locked the front door behind him and returned to my work.

I’ve made the following point a number of times to the people I work with/on/around several times, mainly because I have yet to receive an answer: What is it about the word “TATTOO” written in the pink neon gas-filled glass tubing that takes up the majority of the shop front window that says to every passerby “Through that door lies the solution to my most petty and random plea for convenience. I must go unto those who work within and interrupt their tasks with my nonsense”? If I had a dollar for every crackhead that asked us to store their gardening equipment in our back room while they tried to sell stacks of random music CD-R’s to everyone in the building, I’d be living up to whatever expectation the neon radiance has apparently burned into the backs of their cranial cavities. If I could only harness the power of the Glowing Word and command whatever forces that draw carloads of DUI suspects out of their poorly parked cars and into our lobby and demands that they ask us to use our single toilet before walking half a block, past two sufficiently dark alleyways, to fill their bladders further at the nearby strip club that contains a multi-stationed toilet for each gender; with a power of that magnitude, I could rule the world! Bwah ha ha ha ha!!