J-J-J-Joker Face J-J-Joker Face

Alternate Title: In Which Nocturnal Gardening Becomes the Subject of Much Puzzlement

In my experience, "normal" gardening time is either early in the morning, or in the evening (or if you live in Texas in heat so bad it melts ice cubes through the freezer, at night around ten or so). Two nights ago, after finishing my Calculus homework (wait, "finishing"? I'm sorry, I meant "being beaten up by"), I heard a weird noise outside of my window.

Considering I live on the seventh floor of a gargantuan, generally impenetrable  fortress dorm, this was quite a noise. I couldn't tell what it was for a minute, and then it hit me--someone was mowing the lawn. At two a.m. Pardon me, did I miss something? I thought normal gardeners mowed the lawn at normal times. Oh wait. We're at university. Where nothing is normal. This explains why I've never seen a lawn mower on my walks to class. And why I will not be hanging around outside of the dorms at two a.m. I'm too paranoid about being run over by some vicious lawn mower gone rogue.

Also strange things outside at late hours: eighteen wheelers. These massive trucks bring food and other assorted necessities to the dining halls and market, and so they don't have to navigate around thousands of students making their way to class, they show up, you guessed it, at odd hours of the night.  The end result is me looking out my window at around 1 30 in the morning, already exhausted and sleep-deprived, and my mind conjuring up an image like this:

Yes, that does happen to be a fearsome Dragon Truck. It's true. Haven't you noticed that eighteen wheelers look like dragons from the side? And from the front? Or, anywhere, really, except that giant rectangle they happen to be dragging along? So the next time you're on a road trip, every time you pass an eighteen-wheeler you can just think about how it's a decapitated dragon head pulling things along behind it. Powered by magic, or the souls of dragon-slayers. Whichever.

And here's an artless segue into another strange thing about life: working retail. It's bad enough working for minimum wage and having to go through a Monster Trucks like competition to find a parking space in the overcrowded parking lot. It's even worse when customers with a sense of entitlement and superiority look at you like you're some kind of vile insect oozing pus that needs to be squished. It's not very flattering, and leads to:

Verona's Tips for Job Success

1. Suppress your urges. 

Applicable Situation: You walk into your job after a long day at school, and a customer is wandering around the store aimlessly, looking at merchandise. Since you're a good little sales associate, you decide to say a chipper, "Hi! How are you?"

What do you receive in response?

Stony. Silence. You can hear crickets chirping in the background,and the withering look he/she's giving you is enough to melt anyone's sunshiny happy day into something resembling a graveyard at midnight with black pus oozing out of the headstones. 

My First Urge: to draw a massive smile on his/her face with permanent marker. Why do I suppress this urge? Because one, I'm not really big on violating people's space; two, I don't fancy getting thrown in jail; and three, I fear the results would turn out something like this:

 

In which case I would end up laughing hysterically, making the customer even MORE furious and the likelihood that I would go to jail about 100%, give or take a swift punch to the head. On the positive side, I wouldn't have to worry about ever getting a job in retail again.

"Here, truly,  there be dragons." --Neil Gaiman, Stardust