Hey little girl, want some candy?

Yesterday started out bizarre enough when a lady called the store going on about Morgellon's Disease. It just so happens that I have heard of this from a link that was e-mailed to me months ago. It is a real disease but it sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie. People with the condition will get open sores and lesions where fibers of different colors will grow. It is very strange stuff, but it is also very rare. So this lady is going on about Morgellon's saying her house was infested with these cotton parasites all due to a rug that she brought back from Mexico. She then went on to say that you can see the parasites under a black light because they glow. Well, lady, a lot of things glow under a black light. She tells me to go out and buy a black light, which are hard to find right now because of the Morgellon's scare, and shine it on everything in the store and at my house. Only then will I be safe from the cotton menace. I told her I surely would so she would hang up and never call back, but came to two conclusions about her. Maybe she really is just a paranoid hypochondriac who feels the need to call places of business and warn them about parasites that come out of cotton made products. Or, she works for a black light company and is using fear to sell more black lights, kind of like the Chewley's Gum representative in Clerks.

The day progressed somewhat normally after this. Until around 8:15 when a five year old girl got bit by a fucking dog in the store during a training class. The trainers and the parents have the girl in the office with the first aid kit and are disinfecting the wound (I thought I saw fibers growing out if it). She had been bitten on her right side which broke the skin and drew some blood, and was really not that bad. Then again, I'm a grown-up and she is a five year old girl, so to her it was probably the worst pain she had ever been in. They put a band-aid on it and I go into the next office with the mother and the girl to fill out an incident report. They were actually very cool about the situation considering their daughter had just been almost eaten in the store. We get down to the end of the report and I ask if it would be okay to take a Polaroid picture of the wound for insurance purposes and the mother says 'sure'. Now comes the hard part. Now we have to convince this girl to take the band-aid off. She is not having it. We are in the office for 30 minutes trying to talk this girl into removing the band-aid, not because she thought it would hurt to take it off, but because she thought it was making the pain of the sore go away. I offer her candy, a soda, and eventually a Finding Nemo flashlight shaped like Dory to take this thing off for two seconds so I can snap the picture. Finally, the dad had to come in and hold the little girl while the mother rips the band-aid off with the girl screaming the whole time. I take the picture and the girl takes her candy and new flashlight and they go off to buy some Barbie band-aids at the grocery store. The picture didn't even come out that well.