Because I can never seem to answer a question without making some smart-ass remark, that’s why!
Working where I do for as long as I have, I have seen hundreds (possibly thousands) of people come and go (I’m talking employees). As a result of this I try not to get too personal with them. Of course I am courteous and friendly with them; I just don’t talk a lot about myself, and hope they keep to themselves as well. I have become pretty good friends with a couple of them over the years, but that is the exception, certainly not the rule. So many people come and go from this place that I honestly don’t even bother to learn their names until they have worked there for at least a month -that is not a joke.
A woman started working there about two months ago and she is the one that I now work with on Saturday nights. Last Saturday she asked me flat-out if I didn’t like her. I looked at her for a second kind of confused before I asked her why. It turns out that she thought I didn’t like her because I don’t talk to her a lot. That is certainly not the case, as I explained to her, the less I talk to her the better: If I have to talk to the other employees a lot it usually means they are doing a lot of things wrong. I like working with her better than the other employees because she is able to do what needs to be done without me having to point it out to her, that is a very good trait.
Once this woman realized that I didn’t hate her, she began to talk to me a lot more. I have no problem with that, but I don’t really like to discuss my life with people that I know will be nothing but a memory in less than a year. So it was that when she asked me what I like to do when I wasn’t at work I told her that I was a serial killer. We then had a lengthy conversation about serial killers, mostly about Ed Gein (my all time favorite, since he was just batshit-insane), but also covering the more familiar ones such as BTK, Ted Bundy and Richard Ramirez(sp?). It was a good conversation, it is not often that I am engaged in a conversation about something that fascinates me such as serial killers do. And that was that.
A man I knew came into the store today to rent a rug doctor (carpet steam cleaner thingy). I asked him if he needed garbage bags to put on the floor while he dismembered the body (note that it is necessary to gauge who the person is before asking such a question: It would suck to ask that of a real serial killer). The woman laughed when she heard me asking the question, which was the intent of course.
Later, another man came in to rent a rug doctor. Two rentals in one day is something I have never seen in all my years working there. As I was filling out the paperwork, I said there sure must have been a lot of murders on St. Patrick’s Day. The guy renting the machine asked why I said that, and I told him it was our second machine that day. He just said, “oh”. As he was signing the paperwork, I told him to make sure to also replace the padding beneath the blood stains, and most importantly to remove the baseboards before scrubbing the walls (a lot of killers get caught because of that oversight). The man was just staring at me, he just said, “Uh. Okay. Thanks.” Then he walked out the door.
This woman looked at me now, she was laughing pretty hard. “Not everyone is a serial killer, Donnie, Just you.”
I had completely forgotten that I had told her that last Saturday. But that made it seem pretty funny to me as well. Except that I had obviously gauged the guy who just walked out the door wrong. The whole point of the serial killer jokes is to make people laugh, if they don’t laugh it may lead directly to either your own death, or a random swat team showing up at your house as the detectives are digging up your back yard. But it’s so funny when they do laugh.