Work Stories: Episode 39: Donkey in the Lobby

Previously on Work Stories, I wrote about the time that I smelled urinal cakes.  It wasn’t really a story as much as a bunch of information leading up to that moment.  I didn’t really like that installment, and I’m sure that most of you didn’t.  It wasn’t really an interesting installment.  This week, I hope to make things slightly more interesting by telling you about something that happened this week.  Let’s get going with the story then.

As you might know, I work at a museum in the tourist district of my city.  Which city?  I don’t feel like writing that in here, but it should be fairly easy to figure out.  Let me also note that the tourist season is summer, and we’re just coming out the end of the busiest part of the year.  I’m a little bit stressed out from all the insanity, and all the utterly rude, arrogant, and stupid people.  If everybody who visited our area was pleasant, polite, and nice, I wouldn’t be as inwardly angry as I am.  But they aren’t, so there’s a fury rumbling inside me.  And of course, as we near the end of the season, the worst people come for their visits.

To enter the museum, people must buy a ticket.  Then they go between our counter and a railing, scan their ticket, and walk through a turnstile.  It’s as easy as that.  The railing is there to separate the queue from the masses of people in our lobby.  At one end of the railing is the lobby, and at the other is a gate.  This gate is there for people to get their buggies inside, for large groups to enter, and for staff to quickly get in and out of the museum and lobby if need be.  It is also sometimes used as an exit when we must lock up the main exit.  The gate isn’t big.  It is two metal bars hooked to an upright bar at one end, and connected to each other at the other end with another piece of metal.  It isn’t made for too much force.

So on Wednesday, I come out of the depths of our museum to see a man sitting on the gate.  This man probably weighed a good 250 pounds.  He was sitting right on the gate, which was sagging under his weight.  I asked him politely to not sit on the gate.  He just stared at me.  I explained to him that people aren’t supposed to sit on the gate because it was not made to handle the weight.  That was when this guy went from a mistaken tourist to an outright asshole.  What follows is not the exact words, but a paraphrasing of the exchange that occurred:

Me

“Sir, could you please get off of our gate.”

Guy

“Huh?”

Me

“Don’t sit on the gate.  It isn’t made for the weight of a person.”

He gets off of the gate and turns to me.

Guy

“I need to take a picture.”

He turns his back to me and jumps back onto the gate.

Me

“Please get off of the gate.”

Guy

“I’m taking a picture.”

Coworker

“Get off of our gate.”

He begins to ignore us and sits on the gate for another 

minute and a half as we tell him to get down.

This guy had no respect for the property around him.  Everything had to be exactly the way he wanted to and he was not looking at the repercussions and consequences of his actions.  In this case, nothing happened.  He was lucky.  The security officers for our side of the street were not on duty at the time.  He is also lucky that there was a camera where he was situated because I was ready to push him off of the gate.

It is times like these in which I get really angry about my job.  People treat us like shit because they are on vacation.  Everything should go the way that they desire.  That isn’t the way the world works.  You being on vacation does not stop genocide.  It does not stop disease.  It does not prevent and asteroid from hurtling towards Earth at speeds of which we do not know.  None of these things stop, so why do some people who go on vacation feel like their respect for other people should cease to exist?  I don’t get it.

That’s the end of my rant for this week.  I needed to vent a little bit and get that off of my chest.  Sometimes people just piss me right off.  Next week I might give you another happy story.  But then again, it is the end of summer, and if the last two years have proven anything, it’s that these are the couple weeks that things get terrible.  We’ll see.

Until then, don’t go chasing waterfalls.