Dumb and Dumber

I've thoroughly detailed my disgust for customers, co-workers and even bosses. What I haven't touched on are the criminally insane that fill out the rest of the population. There's a legion of losers, especially in southern California, that fall squarely into their own utterly insane category. This ever increasing number of nut jobs are generally unemployed, uneducated and unsober. I don't think unsober is actually a word, but I'm rolling with it because it hurts to recount the ransacking they're doing to my life on a near daily basis. I feel ungood every time I'm forced to interact with these intellectual shortchanged sloths and I'm beginning to think that their reign of paste licking terror is beginning to rub off on my writing.
 
Anyway, not too long ago I came in contact with the perfect example of what I'm referring to here. I was getting ready to take a pizza delivery when a disheveled looking twenty year-old parked his mountain bike in front of our store and wandered on in. The man looked a little like he was left out to languish in the earthly elements, but besides a bit of excess dirt on his pants and an unkempt neck beard, there really wasn't anything too out of the ordinary about the guy. That is, until he launched into a preplanned speech about how he needed $15 because it was an emergency. Don't be foolish enough to think that there was a specific reason behind his request or that there were hard hitting details about what the emergency was either. He was simply stuck in an unknown quandary that could apparently be conquered with a little less than an Andrew Jackson and a little more than an Alexander Hamilton.
 
As was always the case, our crew collaboratively said no. Can you imagine the precedent that we would be setting if we started allocating money to the drug addled and the delusional. The second that that semi-homeless man made it back to the KFC dumpster that he was sleeping in, we'd be done for. He'd gloat to all the other grease trap and gutter skulking grifters about the goods he managed to get out of us. Before we'd even know it, there'd be a disease of detestable drifters lining up to get their dirty mitts on our hard earned money. 

The glory of drifters are that they're never content with dropping their case at the first no that they receive. They always redouble their efforts and come up with unbelievable bullshit. This man was no exception. After being denied the emergency $15 dollars that he was hoping for, he pulled out a smartphone and said he'd sell it to us. Our first thought was that he must have stolen a phone, but before we could even fully judge the man, he honestly informed us that the phone was broken and that it wouldn't actually turn on. He then took it a step further and said, "Yeah, I tried to sell it at the Verizon Store, but they'd only give me $2 dollars worth of in-store credit." After punctuating that impressively forthright bit of non-fiction, he then said, "So how about it? I, um, need it for gas." It was a seamless transition. From fact to fiction in less than a sentence. I mean, why would a vagabond on a ten-speed need gas money? Unless he was going to huff the fumes of his newly pumped 87 octane, him and his appropriately named Huffy were kind of shit out of luck in the utility department.

It took about seven different ways for us to tell him to piss off before he finally got the hint and left. And by left, I mean he hopped on his bike and peddled over to the office of the autoshop across the street in an attempt to mooch more money. 

If only that were the end. The end came in the form of the same freeloader coming in around four hours later asking for $25 dollars. I'm guessing that he plead his empty case to every operation across town and that he was on lap two of his lecherous demands. My question is when did the price of his emergency go up? Wouldn't you go down as opposed to up? I mean, I thought it was ballsy to ask for $15. Usually the needy start with pocket change and eventually work their way up to a Washington. This hobo all-star was a straight shooter, though. He went all in. Why peddle for peanuts when you can go straight for the grand prize. I appreciate that kind of boldness too. The fact that he's willing to ride around town for ten hours a day, not fear rejection and shoot for the stars is admirable. I can't even subscribe to Match.con because my self-esteem is too fragile to accept the possibility of being refused a date by an overweight, cat lover that works the graveyard shift at Denny's. I can't imagine being told to fuck off by every person of power in a city that has a population of 72,000. I wish I had half of that unwavering confidence and a fraction of that air of, "I don't give a shit." It's a sort of massively misguided form of determination. I just don't get why that uncaring, overly confident personality trait has to go hand in hand with not showering, refusing employment and committing lewd acts in front of eleven year-olds. 

I have to respect how this guy's begging price increased as the day wore on, though. It's like he was hoping to run us ragged with his rich demands. All I really want to know is the exact moment that it dawned on him that he needed to make the savvy business decision to double the rate of his shitty form of solicitation. I guess it just goes to show you that you don't need to be a customer to provoke people and you don't need to be a fellow work peon to piss off your fellow man. You just need to suck the valuable time and energy out of the marrow of those around you.