Work Stories: Episode 17: The Cup Story

Previously on Work Stories, I talked about another car I saw.  This time it was a replica of the car from Starsky and Hutch.  That was an exciting sight.  I never expected that.  I never anticipated it.  I never knew I wanted to see it until I saw it.  Now you know that I saw it.  This week, I’ll get away from the cars and I’ll give you a story about something else.  What?  I don’t know yet.  I’m deciding right now.

I’ve got it! This story is actually somewhat a story and not just an observation.  That’s right.  Something actually happens this time!  Exciting, isn’t it?  This is a story of great consequence.  Well, not really.  There wasn’t much consequence to it, and we went about business as normal following it.  But there is a beginning, a middle, and an end to it.  So there’s that.  And now I bring you, the cup story.

You might be wondering what I mean by “cup story.”  It’s simple.  The museum that I work at has a few interactive aspects, and one of them is 12 cups that you can play with.  Unlike some of the other stuff that you must pay a little extra to try out, the cups are free.  They are primarily for stacking, but it’s not like other stuff hasn’t been done with them.  Stacking?  Yeah.  You build pyramids out of the cups.  That’s what stacking means.

As I have told you many times before, and I will many times in the future, I am primarily a cashier at the museum.  I take people’s money and let them go inside.  There are some things inside that you have to pay for.  Just a few games and arcade-like things.  Some people don’t like the fact that they have to pay multiple times to use some of the stuff, but I don’t care.  It’s a job.  I do what I’m paid to do.

One night, I let a family of four in.  It was two adults, and two smaller children.  I’m guessing that they didn’t like the museum by what resulted from their time inside.  Did they destroy/vandalize?  Not quite, but something did happen, and it all started upon their return to the entrance to leave.

Upon returning to where I was, with my coworker at this point, they informed us that the token machine upstairs (where you get tokens for the games) was not working and that there were people upstairs who were upset about it.  I look at my coworker, then go upstairs with a few tokens so that people can play the games.  This is when things started to go awry.

If I remember correctly, there were three couples upstairs.  I asked the first if they wanted tokens.  They said no.  I asked the second.  The answer was still no.  I asked the third pair.  They also declined.  I thought out loud about how strange that was.  The third couple informed me that the people who had come downstairs and informed us were the ones who were angry and complaining.  This means that the family was lying to me.  Okay, that’s fair.  I might sometimes twist the truth to get people to come inside.  Then I turned the corner.

Here is where the free cups come into play.  When I turned the corner, I noticed something was wrong at the cups station.  There were no cups.  Who takes 12 cups that have no use other than for building pyramids?  Probably a family of four who were mad because they didn’t like the museum and couldn’t get tokens from a machine that wasn’t working.  They stole our cups.  Vandalism/destruction of property is pretty bad and may not have happened, but theft is just as bad.

Luckily, we have extra cups stored away, and I was able to replace the set fairly quickly.  It still bothers me that people would up and take our cups.  It just causes more problems for us, on top of the token machine that wasn’t working.  So, yeah.  When you don’t like a museum, maybe you should help make it better, not take something and make it worse.  That’s just ruining the experience for other people.

That’s the Work Story for this week.  It had a beginning, a middle, and an end.  You got exactly what I promised you.  Next time, I don’t know what I’m going to write about.  Hopefully it won’t be another car because I’ve written about enough of them for now.  Until next time, stay frosty.