I am so so glad I am getting out of this job!!! One of the things that has been bothering me is that my boss keeps scheduling me for all the Friday evening shifts. We're only open in the evening on Fridays, and we're supposed to have students who work on the Friday evenings and in the weekends. But since she never replaced the one student, and the other one has an internship and can't work on the Friday evenings, I've been scheduled for 75% of the Friday evenings. We're open until 9pm and of course Friday is the start of the weekend when everyone goes out drinking and partying. I work in a store that's kind of on the outskirts of the main shopping area, but we're in between 2 grocery stores and 2 drug stores and a junior college and a giant parking lot. There are a lot of homeless people who hang around in that parking lot. So Friday night, this guy who we are pretty sure is homeless came in at the beginning of my shift, (I only worked 3 hours that night) and apparently he had also been in once that day. He talks to himself the whole time he's walking around and if someone gets within a meter or so of him, he starts directing his conversation at that person. But he talks really fast and he's drunk, so he's really hard to understand, so all I caught was something about an earring, 9 carats, something about White, at which point he grabbed his jacket...he wasn't wearing a shirt, so his chest was bare under the jacket, which was only zipped about 1/4 of the way. So he's just looking around and talking to himself or to me as I came into his vicinity, and I can't understand him, so I just nod a lot. He's come in several times and I never had a problem. I figured he's probably mentally ill, and he needs someone to just be kind and not treat him like dirt. He left, and I kept sweeping the floor. Towards the end of the night, he came back in. We had everything done in the store. We had put all the clothes away from the fitting room rack, made sure everything was put in the right place, all the clothes were hanging correctly, the floor was swept, the mat in front of the door was vacuumed....everything looked nice. So we had gotten out the last cart from our shipment on Tuesday to hang the rest of the clothing that had come in. So we're busy doing that, and it's just me and the newer coworker who replaced the one out with a burnout. She's only been working there since November, so not that long. So the guy comes back in carrying a bouquet of tulips from the Jumbo (a supermarket), and he comes up and starts talking and he's holding up the flowers, but neither of us can understand what he's saying. Finally he shoves the tulips in our faces and we don't know what he wants. He tosses them into our cart and walks away towards the men's clothing. We keep hanging clothes, and then he comes back and he holds up a pair of 20 euro sweatpants and says something about them only costing 1 euro. My coworker says, no, they are 20 euros. He says he'll give us the tulips and take the pants. She tells him no, we can't accept the tulips as payment. He says the tulips are worth 20 euros. She points to the 3.50 price tag and says no, but we can't take them as payment anyway. He throws the sweatpants down. She picks them up and starts folding them back up. He walks down an aisle and comes back with some of those paper doiley plate liners, if you know what I'm talking about....like....they look like lace, but they are paper, and you line a round tray with them to make it look fancy? Anyway, he has 2 packages of those, throws them on the floor, and sets down an easter decoration, like a vase or a candle or something? And he says "That's for in bed tonight." And he walks down another aisle, and my coworker picks up the stuff and is putting it back on the shelves, and he comes with a lacey lingerie cover up, and a blanket, and he sets them down on the table with the easter display. So my coworker says "Sir, can you please not keep picking stuff up and leaving it everywhere?" And he takes his keys and shoves them in her face and I couldn't understand what he was saying to her, but she said "No, sir, we don't need your keys." And then he tosses his keys on the display table. He picks up the blanket and coverup and walks to the counter and sets them down next to a register, than starts walking around again. She picks up his keys and hands them back to him....I think it was maybe at this point that he threw them on the floor near me, so I picked them up and went to hand them back to him. He went over by the door, and we have these sale bins that we normally put out front every day, and one has blankets, but it had rained, so we kept the blankets inside on Friday. So he goes over, grabs a blanket, and we're like "Sir, you have to pay for that." and he throws it out the door onto the sidewalk. Then he throws his keys outside as well. So my coworker goes and grabs the blanket and puts it away and says to him that maybe it's a good time to go home for the night. He starts talking about a bag...he needs a plastic bag. "We don't have plastic bags, Sir." and he's saying something about a "swerver" which is like...a derogatory name, like hobo or migrant, but it's definitely got the connotation of being an unsavory individual. He says something about this swerver, and I THINK he maybe said the guy was Turkish, and something about a bag, but it was dirty and he wanted a clean one. We've been handing him the tulips back and he keeps laying them down all over the store, and we give them back. So at this point they were on a box next to the cart where we were hanging clothes, and he walks off to go get this bag down the street. I asked my coworker if we should maybe call the police. This whole time, the keys he threw out the door are still on the ground, it's dark, and it's like -2 degrees Celsius outside, and he's walking around with a bare chest, drunk. So we don't really know what the protocol is....no one ever told us what to do in a case like this, and he's not really being aggressive, but he IS tossing stuff around and won't leave, and he's probably mentally ill and definitely been drinking. He's unpredictable and if he gets agressive, this is WAY above our paygrade to deal with. So I suggest she call the assistant manager, because the manager was working in a different store that needed help. So she's trying to call Ramona, but Ramona isn't picking up. The guy comes back in with his bag, saying it's dirty, and something about the "Swerver" and he shows me the inside of the bag, in which there's a beer can, which he pulls out and holds upside down so it's dripping on the floor, and he's saying "Blech! Blech!" and I'm like "Sir, that needs to go outside." so he takes the bag and tosses it out the door. I'm like "Sir, your keys are still on the ground there." so he grabs his keys. My coworker managed to get Ramona on the phone, and she mouths to me over his shoulder that she's on her way, which she had said Ramona wasn't picking up so I was hoping she had called the police and THEY were on the way. But the guy is still talking about a bag. Oh, and when he was outside, we have racks with umbrellas over them full of winter coats, and he grabs one and hangs it on the door and says "This needs to go inside." So I grab it, and when he's not looking, I put it back. So now he's talking about a bag, he needs a bag, and repeats the stuff about the earring and 9 carats. My coworker grabs the tulips and hands them to him, he says he'll trade them for a bag. He needs a plastic bag. She repeats that we don't have plastic bags. We have these more sturdy totes that are kind of plastic-y looking, but they aren't disposable. They are meant to be reused, and we have Disney ones that cost 2 euros. So he grabs one and says he'll take that, and she says he has to pay for it, so he throws it on the floor. She picks it up and asks him to stop throwing stuff. He tries to shove the tulips at her to trade for the bag. We keep telling him that the tulips are not payment, we can't take them as payment. He grabs the bag again and sets the tulips down on a sale bin, and says he'll just take the bag. "Sir, you have to pay for the bag." He says that's what the tulips are for. No, we can't accept that as payment. When he finally walked out the door, he stopped at the sale bins and says "I can just take this stuff, right?" and we said no, you have to pay for it, and he grumbled "Can't even take THIS stuff!" I think it took us about half an hour to finally get rid of him, and we had been picking up all the stuff he was throwing on the floor and putting it all away, and I don't know how many times he threw his keys on the floor and I picked them up and handed them back to him, or he put them on the counter, or wherever...I think I must have handed them back at least 5 times, and I'm pretty sure SHE handed them back at least twice, plus the time he threw them out the door and I told him they were still there on the ground where he threw them. It was exhausting and pretty scary, because we didn't know if he was going to get aggressive, and it was right at the end of the night, so if we couldn't get him to leave before we closed, we wouldn't be able to close and go home. And if we got him to leave, would he be waiting outside when we locked up? I was SOOOOOO glad it was cold and I had asked my husband to drop me off and pick me up so I didn't have to ride my bike on the ice in the dark, because I would have been TERRIFIED to ride my bike home alone in the dark after that encounter. By the time Ramona got there, he had literally just walked off....I wasn't even sure he was actually gone yet, because he had only walked out and started walking through the parking lot, and it's dark....it's hard to see. And there were a couple of men down a little further, just beyond one of the drug stores, and I couldn't see if he was one of them. And in any case this was the 3rd time he had been in the store that day, so he could easily come back again. It was just....scary. Ramona said he came back Saturday, wearing different clothes, but he was barefoot, and he asked if he could have a shopping basket. But it didn't sound like he caused any problems that time. She said no, we couldn't give baskets away, and he left. Anyway, I'm glad to be getting out of there in a couple of weeks!!!
Anyway, I've been trying to get outside to walk on days that I don't work, to get some exercise and fresh air. There's a place I particularly like to walk. It's on the outskirts of town, really near my street, but it's pretty isolated because it's behind a wooded area. They've been saying on the news that the conditions are good for "hair ice" so get out and walk in a wooded area and you might see this uncommon phenomenon. So I did!
This is hair ice. Here it's actually nicknamed "Father Winter's beard" or something....it only grows on dead wood under certain conditions, so it's a pretty rare thing. I found a couple patches of it, but this one I could actually get up to to get a decent picture of.
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Some other things I took pictures of because they just looked cool....like spider webs that are iced over, so it's like strings of ice in the bushes/trees:
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And there are some trees that have berries and of course now there are no berries on them, but they look really cool all iced over.
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And there were these little small like....bushes I guess? but very sparse now, and covered with like....strings of ice. They were all over.
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So basically, this is a street....there are a few houses, but not many, and they have really large yards....some where people keep sheep, or horses, or highland cows. One has a pig. But the houses are all on the one side, and on the other side is trees. There are some walking paths between the trees, but the paths were really muddy, and you can't really walk off the paths because of ditches, fallen trees, steep inclines/declines, etc, so I stay on the street, but it's a rather secluded area. It's very quiet there and only every once in a while a car will go by, and if I stay on that road, it eventually circles back around to my neighborhood, so it has this feeling of being completely isolated without it actually being isolated. I love it there. I can get my exercise and fresh air without it being peopley.
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