the Sixty Seventh Story

I worked at a pet store for one year in high school. People would sometimes drop off little kittens in cardboard boxes, hoping we'd take over finding them homes. One time, we got two little bits who were only  a few hours old. They came home with me- they needed to be few every hour, so I would take them everywhere. They would suckle on anything, given the chance, so had to be kept separate when unsupervised to prevent them from hurting each other. So- to attend school with them as subtly as possible, I would put one in the right pocket of my lab coat, and the other in the left. All my teachers pretended not to notice, and I pretended not to know that they knew. I'd feed them in the bathroom between each class, and, for a few weeks, was late to everything. No one complained. As they got a bit bigger and only needed one feeding during the school day (and had stopped suckling each other's fur off), my art teacher agreed to let them stay in her office.

the fortieth story

This one is also at the pet store, and happened relatively soon after I started, so not long after my 16th birthday. I include that as an anti embarrassment feature, because this is stupid even for me.

Whoever was opening the store would come in at least an hour before the shop was to open- this gave time to clean the cages, scoop out dead fish, and generally make the idea of having pets look appealing instead of like drudgery.Tasks included cleaning all the fish tanks; they were on one system, so you could simply set the siphon going in the end tank, effectively run the water backwards, and there you'd have it, clean water. It was, though, very important to stop running the siphon. The first morning I was there by myself, I forgot that last bit. I flooded the store pretty thoroughly. I had flooded it to the point that there was water flowing out the front door. And I couldn't find a damned mop. So I did what any self respecting young girl would do in a difficult situation- I called my dad. This was another of our entertainingly cryptic phone conversations. "Dad- do we have a mop at home?" "I'll be right there, Princess" (yes, my dad calls me princess sometimes. Drop it.) Between the two of us, we had the whole mess cleaned up well before opening, but my brand new boss, when she came in, was VERY suspicious of the clean floor.

the thirty ninth story

My first real paying job was at a pet store. At the pet store, we had birds. We also had fish, but fish don't really care one whit about people. Amongst the birds, we had some cockatiels, a small parrot, that sort of thing; those would live in the shop long enough that we would make good friends with them, and were always sad to see them go. We also had a big flight cage with parakeets. The parakeets were fairly cheap, and so made their way through the shop quite quickly- also there were so many of them, and they looked so similair, that it was hard, on our part, to make friends. We just didn't ever take them out and play with them. All they knew about us was that, occasionally, one of us would reach into the cage and grab a bird, who was never seen again. They didn't like us, and this was a reasonable conclusion on their part. One time, there was a little boy, and he had his eye on a particular bird. This always made things complex, but I was game. I waited till the one bird was near the door. I put down the internal gate so the other birds, further away, couldn't get out. I opened the door. I stuck my hand in. He attacked. I have never been so viciously and singlemindedly attacked by a living creature, before or since. This tiny bird wanted my blood. The way he was holding on, I couldn't get my hand out of the cage without potentially hurting the bird (for the purposes of this story, assume that this is synonymous with "It was impossible to get my hand out"). I also didn't want to make a scene, what with this kid and his parents there. So I stood there, trying to gently pry this nasty, malicious little creature from my hand. I did finally get him off.
I grabbed a different bird, and, with my injured hand behind my back, told the kid that the bird he wanted just wasn't very well behaved, and I'd chosen him a better match. He was pissy. His parents got pissy, demanding the first bird. I told them that, not only did they NOT want the first bird, I wasn't going to try to catch it again. This went back and forth for some minutes before I finally got sick of it, pulled my bloody hand from behind my back, and said "This! This is why!". They silently paid for the bird I'd chosen for them. And I have the silliest assortment of scars on my right hand.