The Hat

            Sometimes I wonder if the only reason my boss keeps me around is because I’m entertaining.  Sure, I’m great with the customers and I come up with nifty ideas for the shop, but there has got to be some other reason they put up with my antics.  Time and time again I walk into Richard’s office and ask him if I can do something absurd.  What's even stranger is before I go in there, I come up with information to back up my reasoning.  At times I’ve actually convinced him to let me do some very odd things.

            Though, some of the best stories I have from work I managed to accomplish all on my own.  In fact, just the other day I came across something in the front of the store that enhanced my day by about 75%.  I was digging around the front counter looking for rubber bands or something when I came across something glorious hidden deep in one of the back cabinets.

            It was a hat.  Not just any hat, mind you, a genuine, all American trucker hat.  Best of all, it had the store’s logo on it.  Therefore, my boss had no choice but to let me wear it.

            I couldn’t remember a time where a hat made me so happy.  Then again, I try to get overly excited about everything at work so I’m never bored.  My manager gets super creeped out by it, but in all honesty, he’s never heard me complain about how boring my job is.  “Wow, I can’t believe I have to refill fifty cartridges today.” becomes “This is nice, I get to sit down for a few hours and relax while I refill some cartridges.”

            Now, first thing I did when I found this hat was run into the bathroom and figure out how I was going to wear it all day.  First, I decided to pull my hair through the back in a ponytail.  I had forgotten to bring a hairbow with me to work, so this was beneficial in more ways than one.

            Later, while bending over to get something, my ponytail separated into two pieces and fell over my shoulders.  This happens all the time because my hair is so long, but it had never happened to me while I was wearing an awesome trucker hat.  I didn’t get a look at myself until the next time I used the restroom.  When I did, I laughed so hard it scared the rest of the employees.

            My hair falling to my front paired with my new, blunt-cut bangs and the trucker hat had managed to form a pseudo-mullet.  I’m still not sure why that combination came forth, but I couldn’t stop laughing.
 

            Now, under any other circumstances my hair would not look like a mullet.  My haircut is what I consider to be very fashionable.  It looks like this but about a foot longer (that is not me, by the way).

            I ran around the store reveling in my awesome fake-mullet.  Any time I spoke to one of m superiors I did so in a gruff, southern man-voice peppered with various CB radio terms.  None of it made sense, but that didn’t really matter to me at all.

“Hey, can you refill some PGI-5’s for me?  We’re running low.”  My manager would ask.

“That’s a big 10-4, good buddy.”  I replied.

“O-kay. . .”

            It was glorious.

            When it came time for lunch I realized that I was missing an important part of my trucker appearance.  A moustache.  Going back to the last time my boyfriend and I went grocery shopping I remembered that the market across the street had a bubble machine with fake moustaches inside.  I went super out of my way during my lunch break to acquire one of those.

            You might think that a trip to the grocery store during a thirty minute lunch break isn’t that bad, but it is when you don’t have a car.  I have to run across the highway to get to one road, then cross that road to get to my favorite lunch place.  Now, on top of that, I had to run across another road and all the way to the other side of the shopping center.  All for a moustache.  Worth it?  I think so.

            When I did get to the grocery store’s moustache machine, I lovingly placed my fifty cents into the slots and turned the wheel.  I wasn’t sure what kind of moustache I was going to get, so I was a tad worried that I’d end up with something useless like sideburns.  However, luck was on my side, and I received the most magnificent of moustaches that could possibly come with a sticker on the back.

            I high-tailed it back to the store, clocked in and donned my new facial hair.  My trucker persona was complete.  Now, every CB radio phrase I shouted at my coworkers had so much more meaning behind it.  I felt at peace with the world for the first time in days.

 
           Of course, my boss made it very clear that he didn’t care if I wore the moustache in the store just as long as I didn’t wear it in front of customers.  I was a bit disappointed, but I understood.  While my coworkers were used to me being excessively weird in the back of the store, the customers saw the customer service side of myself.

 

Luckily I’ve turned transforming between weird-me and professional-me an art.