I am kept entertained.

A few things happened at work last night that made it all worth while.

The first is, I got a beard compliment. There was a guy that came by, eyeing the pizza. I have a feeling he had never been in the store before. He said, "Ooh, all these pizzas look fantastic!"
"Thank you very much."
"Wow, nice beard - how long you been working on that?"
"It's been a long-term commitment. And I'm, like, half Italian."
"Very nice."
Immediately after that happened I got out my phone and sent a text message to my brother, a fellow beard enthusiast. The message said this: "Im at work I got a beard compliment".
A little while later, I got this as a reply: "Just wait til you get a taint compliment"
My brother is hilarious.


The second happening occurred when a chubby 11 or 12 year old boy with a curly afro and a stuffed snake around his neck walked by my area.
I said, "Be careful, man. Those things are poisonous."
"Hey, that hurt. He's nice." He then went on to explain, "You can't say that stuff to me. I'm from California. The ghetto." A few seconds later he continued, "Sorry. I just always wanted to say that."
He then walked away.


Lastly, near the end of closing, a man came by to sample some pizza. Apparently he does this quite often, because he was having a conversation with the other guy I was working with. Eventually he goes, "Alright, I gotta go, I got people waiting on me. We were having a picnic and I had to stop by to get some meat. And then I gotta go down to Trader Joe's for some hot dogs without any nitrates in them."
For a guy that had to leave, he certainly had a lot to say, because he then began to explain just why it was that he specifically wanted hot dogs without any nitrates in them.
"You know, I was reading a study out of California (Note: What is it with California?) that linked nitrates to cancer. They said that kids who eat hot dogs with nitrates in them are 9 times more likely to get, like cancer and leukemia and stuff like that."
I decided this guy was just crazy enough for me to engage him in this conversation.
"You know, even though it's 9 times more likely, the odds that a child will get leukemia is still very very distant. If a kid has .001% chance of getting leukemia, and eating hot dogs with nitrates will multiply that by 9, then the his chances are still .009%."
"Well, yeah, but...what if it's your kid, you know?"
At this point I'm thinking, "So you're saying that hot dogs will give kids leukemia?"

It's this kind of paranoid overprotective bullshit I hate in parents. My parents never fed me any nitrate-free hot dogs and I'm pretty sure I never had leukemia.

The guy walked away, and I saw him stop and chat to someone at the coffee counter. He must've been in a hurry.