I have come to realize that my on-campus job at the university has its own set of daily stories. Maybe it is more interesting a job than I once thought...
Wednesday shift: Just saw a man get so angry that he popped a boner...because he got hit in that area with a basketball...suddenly Cards Against Humanity comes to life.
Saturday shift: I normally don't work on Saturdays, but I picked up an extra shift to make some more money over the weekend. This particular day, there was a basketball camp going on in the courts, and many parents and their younger children were sitting around and watching their kids play. Some of the kids there were so small; they were so adorable when they try to run across the court chasing huge basketballs and it was all they could do not to fall on their faces. On the sidelines, I watched a perfectly able-bodied 6-year-old kid drag himself, face down, 20 feet across the floor with his hands and elbows to retrieve the basketball that had rolled away...then, with the basketball in one hand, he dragged himself, face down, all the way back. He won the scooching contest.
I see a lot of odd, funny things at my current job.
Later: The kid who dragged himself across the floor was now muttering to himself happily like a lunatic.
Even later: I discovered that the basketball camp had thrown in the garbage lots of half-full, recyclable plastic water bottles, so a co-worker and I took all the plastic bottles out of the bin, emptied them, and put the bottles in the recycling.
Wednesday, shift 1: Today at my job, I played peekaboo with a 6 year old kid while his dad played basketball. He was bored and a little shy, but every time he passed by my desk, I said, "Now where did he go? I just saw him a second ago..." and then shrieked a little as though I was startled when he popped out to the side and said "Boo!" "Ah! You got me!"
Wednesday, shift 2: I don't normally work two shifts in one day, but I did this time to get out of working on Friday.
I have another work story... This time it did not happen in the basketball courts (wow, shocking change of location, I know, because I normally work in the basketball courts)--it was in the Equipment Room that no one ever checks out equipment from.
The security guard was telling me and a co-worker about how he met his wife and how their zodiac signs aligned perfectly, which they didn't know until their marriage. He was in the airforce as a young man, stationed in South Korea, taught himself Korean after a few months..(his wife is Korean).
So the security guard shows us the picture of him as a young man, his wife, and in their wedding photo they are both wearing traditional Korean garb and their headdresses are beautiful and ornate.
They visited the wife's brother in South Korea last year and people were amazed that this really tall, kind of old American man could speak Korean better than his Korean wife. (Many people, like taxi drivers, thought his wife was Chinese because her Korean was rusty.) They went to this temple together and the security guard waited outside because he was tired. He started talking to this elderly woman and they were having a nice conversation when the woman's granddaughter came out of the temple.
She said to him, "I'm sorry if my grandmother was bothering you." He replied replied, "No no, we were just chatting."
"Oh. That's funny. My grandmother doesn't usually talk to strangers. Plus she doesn't really speak English."
"Oh no, we were speaking in Korean."
She just looks at him (confused and amazed at this African American man) and says "Oh. You speak Korean?"
The security guard watches a lot of Korean soap operas while at work, while things are slow or quiet, it's kind of funny. He is excellent at his job and a cool person to get to know, also a talented artist.
