Adventures In Vending

My father has been employed as a vending machine attendant for the past ten years of his life; driving a van filled to the brim with various vending machine snacks, sandwiches, and sodas. He fills the machines in office buildings, chain stores, private businesses and Blue Shields.

"Had a sexual harassment charge filed against me. I figured with the things I say to people and the fact that I push it to the edge I must have shocked some old prude."

My father isn't the type that sexually harasses women. Rather, he establishes a flirtatious rapport.

"It got pretty bad I guess. My boss told them he didn't believe I would sexually harass anyone, and that more than likely what I said was taken wrong."

Once when I was in the K-Mart check out line with him (it's the only clothing store in Paradise), just as he was about to hand the poor unsuspecting anorexic-blond-high-school-slut behind the counter his money, he turned on the child molester charm, lowering his voice, getting up enough flem to make it sound gravely yet maintaining a jubilant tone, said, "Do you know what PHAT stands for?" The girl looked at him as she extended her hand for the money and said, as if in hopes of successfully humoring him, "No sir, what?" "Plenty hips and tits, heh, heh, heh."

"They tried to have me removed immediately but Ron told them to slow down and show him I was being malicious and not just a smart ass."

Any one of the hundreds of women at Blue Shields could have been responsible for the complaint.

"As you know they won't tell you who charged you unless you fight it in court. I go to this account every day for two hours. When I showed up the next day the girls were shocked that I wasn't barred from the building. That's what they do with one of their own. Just fire the poor guy whether its true or not and bring in a security guard for a week or so in case he comes back to proclaim his innocence and keep his job."

Yet all the girls were on his side.

"The girls were on my side. Over two hundred of them went to the head woman and told her we always joke around and talk a little dirty. Don't know if it helped or hurt now that over two hundred women said I talk dirty to them."

He drives a black Nissan truck which at one point had accessible seats behind the initial bucket seats, but now they are filled with various things--rope, garbage, shotguns--which means that whenever he was to drive my best friend and me anywhere we would both sit up front in the passenger seat. One time in particular we were sitting up front when he went to shift and ended up running his hand up her ass. In apology he said, "Oh, I'm sorry for grabbing your ass like that." She responded with, "That's okay, I'm used to it." It didn't have to go any further than that, but it did: "I'll have to try and shift more often then."

"Three days pass and I finally find out what I said. Brace yourself--it?s bad. On a Friday I ask this woman if she was doing anything over the weekend. The same question I ask almost everyone on Friday, man or woman, in the course of our conversation."

My father has lived in Paradise all of his life and is one of those people who can't make a trip to the store without it being a three hour venture.

"The next day Ron receives a call that I've now been accused of tampering with the food. Of course he told them no way. Then ask if someone got sick. No was the answer. No one there believed it but that's a serious charge, and in this time of terrorism those in charge tend to overreact."

Maybe five or six years ago my father, when engaged in one of his trips to the store, was shot.

"I had to threaten them with legal action if the police were called in and they had no poisoned employees. True or not, that could ruin my life."

There's a little family owned market down the street from where I live where my father has a tendency to pick up groceries daily. He and the owner have known each other their entire lives and on this one particular occasion my father was helping the man?s wife, who measures about five foot, retrieve something off of a top shelf when my father?s shoulder bag fell to the floor. It was the fifth of July, and the day before he had intended on making noise with one of his favorite noise makers, his derringer. Unfortunately, he never got around to it and mistakenly left it loaded and in his shoulder bag, which fell in such a way that made it go off, striking him in the ankle, destroying the bone and leaving his bloody mass of a foot at a dangle. Fragments of his bone splintered on impact and entered the woman's plentiful ass, which, because of all the confusion, she didn't notice till hours after the fact.

"A few days pass and no one dies or gets sick and they find no evidence of product tampering. Ron gets a call that it was said that I put drugs in the coffee. When Ron told me this I said it must be true. What else would explain what's been going on."

Amazingly there were no charges. And she lost 50 pounds.

"So on goes the investigation. They even sent the pots out to a lab so they could scrape some residue from them to analyze. Just coffee."

There wasn't a story in the paper. There was just my father in the hospital wondering how he could make such a mess of things while sober. They put coral in his leg to fuse with the bone and then lined it with metal plates which were screwed into both the bone and the coral. Over the years the metal plates have shifted and collapsed, the bone didn't heal right and the screws have worked their way out of the skin one at a time. But I'm sure that he thinks that it's worth it because when he opens up conversation about the incident he says, "I shot a woman in a grocery store, and got away with it," and he'll usually leave it at that if there are no more questions.

"A few days later Ron gets a call that one of the women is afraid to come to work because she heard that I shot a woman in a store and show no remorse--that I even said that I fulfilled every man?s dream of shooting a woman, but it would have been nice to shoot one I wanted to shoot instead of one I liked. At last I've been accused of something true. And I even tell it that way when I get asked about it."

I've personally tired of the story, but he's just as impressed with it every time.

"Well a few days later they call to inform us that they?re dropping everything, to forget it ever happened, that they did away with the file and that it will not be recorded so to come back and haunt me later. . .A few days go by and I go in to fill the machines. One of the girls pulls me aside because she thought I should know why they just dropped it. Seems one of the girls went out to have a smoke and left the door open to come back in. When she came in another woman started ranting at her for leaving the door open. That it's against policy. Someone could come in and start shooting people. Like that vending guy. When the smoking woman informed her that it did not matter because he has key cards for all areas she flipped. Started pacing back and forth while yelling that guys dangerous he shouldn't have a key card. They had to restrain her and call an ambulance. They wanted me outta there for what I might have said but this woman could have cost me my job and ruined my life and they do nothing. Not even warn me that a paranoid nut case that might kill me to save everyone else because she sees me as a danger to her. I should have been warned so I could watch out for her. Good start to a new year. But you know me. Let things calm down then start leaving her chips and candy bars on her desk. push her till she snaps. Keeps the job from getting boring even if some people think I'm mean spirited."

It turned out that some devout female member of a church with a bug up her ass was the one who got the mental woman worked up about my fathers history, because she didn't agree with some of his beliefs. She herself had complained about him before but her complaints never stood up. She was the one who spread the rumor about poisoned food--my father had been giving away milk that would expire within the week and didn't give her any. When the manager found out that this woman had provoked the situation with the mental woman they held a meeting with my father, the board and the woman in question, where they were to extinguish her career at Blue Shields. My father, knowing that her husband had recently lost his job as well, requested that they let her keep her job (in front of her) because of that fact, making him the "bigger person." Boy, was she perturbed. Since then there have been new complaints every month. When I talked to him the other day he was happy to say, "I'm not working at Blue Shields anymore." Turns out that the past year of misconstrued behavior and complaints had become trying on his nerves and he could no longer fight the battle. The manager and he hadn't been getting along like they had in previous years due to recent complications and he had to get out. It should have been just as easy as him telling Ron, his boss, that he wanted to give the account to someone else and pick up another one, but none of his fellow workers were willing to take on the project because of the problems my father had been having.

"It's obvious that Blue Shields is the one with the problem, because if it were really my problem, then I'd be having it everywhere." So what did he do? He committed sexual harassment. He entered the manager?s office and made references to the sheerness of her shirt and the way that it accentuated her womanhood. He threw his key card down on the table and announced that he had indeed sexually harassed her. She had him ejected from the building and security posted. Of course he filled the vending machines first. He got out of having to do Blue Shields, and was ironically given the Chico High School instead, where in his words, "The girls are younger, prettier, better fit, and don't know what sexual harassment is, heh, heh, heh."

Now that he's gone, the prices on the food in the vending machines have all gone up somewhere between five and fifty cents because he hadn't changed the prices as a favor to them for the last five years. As a result, they think that they're being punished.

I guess they are.