When my family has a garage sale, THEY HAVE A GARAGE SALE. It’s always 5 or 6 families’ worth of stuff, offering anything you can think of. And we have that shit down to a science, man. Everyone’s crap is labeled with initials so we can keep it all separate, and we keep track of it all in a spiral notebook, divided into columns.
We haven’t had one in several years, so everyone had a whole shit ton of crap sitting in their garages and attics. My mother decided that it was time.
My parents and grandparents (the ones with the Squirrels = Mom’s side) have so much shit, it’s taken them several weeks to transport, organize and price everything they wanted to sell. My mom asked me to come down to my hometown to help them with all of it this week, since the garage sale was scheduled for this weekend.
So I spent the past 5 days at home, dealing with my mother losing her mind because she ends up having to do everything herself.
Aunt Crazy Pills drove down “to help” last weekend. She left boxes of her possessions to sell, but didn’t price anything. She spent her time going through the stuff my grandmother was selling and loading up the back of her truck with boxes and boxes of it.
Her daughter, Cheerleader Cousin, brought boxes of her crap on Thursday, and then went home to lay by her pool all day. She apparently missed the memo that I took Thursday off from work, to help my mom and our 80-year-old grandparents set up the garage sale. I should probably mention that I wasn’t selling anything in the sale, so I’m not even getting any of the money from it.
Funny how I spent my days off feeling like I was at work, doing more than my fair share of work with little reward. By the time the garage sale started yesterday morning, I’d had it.
My mom decided that my dad and I would be the cashiers, since we have the most money-handling experience. Never mind the fact my dad hasn’t been a cashier since he worked at the ol’ Drive n’ Save Market in 1968.
Fifteen minutes after the garage sale started, a morbidly obese man parked his clunker of a car directly in front of the driveway to my grandparents’ house. Everyone coming to the sale had to walk around his car to get in. He was also blocking the fire hydrant on the corner, and was 5 feet away from the stop sign line. Double illegal, jackass.
He waddled into my grandparents’ garage and immediately grabbed the box we’d filled with about 50 pieces of shitty costume jewelry. He dumped it out on the cashier table.
“I want to buy all of this.”
“Ok, just a minute, I’m gonna have to separate it all out,” I said as I quickly began putting the jewelry into piles based on which initial was on each piece.
After 20 seconds, the fatass asked me, “Are you tallying it as you’re sorting?”
“No, I’m gonna sort it and then tally each pile. I can’t keep track of 5 different tallies in my head,” I laughed.
“WELL, I DON’T HAVE ALL DAY.”
I snapped. “Well, if you’re gonna cop an attitude like that, you can just leave.”
“OK, I WILL!” He began waddling back to his car.
I was still pissed. “BY THE WAY, THANKS FOR PARKING YOUR CAR IN FRONT OF THE DRIVEWAY, SO EVERYONE HAS TO WALK AROUND IT!”
He raised his hands into the air and yelled at me, “FREEDOM OF SPEECH!!!”
“YEAH, I KNOW. THAT’S WHY I’M CALLING YOU OUT ON BEING AN ASSHOLE, DUDE.”
As soon as he drove off, all the old-lady-customers started laughing. One of them told me, “I had a garage sale last week, and that guy did the same thing to me! He does that at all the garage sales. Someone needed to tell him off!”
My mom’s friend, Laura, witnessed the whole thing. She told me, “I wish I could stand up to people like you do. I’m such a doormat.”
But seriously, do you know how FUCKING GOOD it felt to finally be able to tell someone off for being an asshole customer? IT WAS AMAZING.
The only problem is I’m worried the guy’s gonna come back and murder my grandparents in their sleep. Lobster said, “Don’t worry about it, because murdering people requires effort, and that fat fuck is just too lazy to do it.”
Lobster is so right.
Man, I wish I could tell the relevant students that they are lazy lil fucktards. Maybe if I see them in the shops after they graduate?