Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Perfectionist Defectionist

My employee Victor was an Olympic athlete that escaped from the Hungarian Olympic team in France, joined the Foreign Legion, went AWOL and somehow got into the US.  He was a stripper (unfortunately, not the naked kind -  the photography kind). It's a very stressful and precise job.  One day Victor was having a few problems and things were not going as smoothly as usual. Nothing serious, but Victor was a perfectionist and he got very upset when he wasn't perfect.
Victor was a born again fundamentalist who believed God controlled everything. When things didn't go perfectly, he of course felt God had a hand in it. So one day, after a couple of minor errors, which required him to do something over, he looked up at the ceiling and shook his fist at God and said "If you think this is so easy I'd like to see you come down here and do it."
He was such a literal believer that he blamed God for everything that went wrong. One morning he choked on a jelly donut and he chastised God for the rest of the day. He always lived in an apartment that his friends rented. He owned two pairs of socks and two pairs of underwear and washed them out every night. That's not an exaggeration, it's actually true. He wore warm up type athletic clothes every day and he was a very fit athlete.
 We sometimes needed to do alterations on the photos with chemicals and we provided blue lab coats to protect employee's clothing. Well, Victor fell in love with the lab coat concept and wore his every day over his athletic gear.  Victor would always go out during his lunch hour wearing the lab coat to either take a walk, or do some sunbathing. One day he decided to go into an open area in the parking lot and lay down for a short nap and get some sunbathing in.
You can guess. Some passerby saw him stretched out and thought he was dead. They called the police and when my partner and I returned from lunch we saw police cars and an ambulance trying to aid him.
Another time he was standing in his lab coat outside our building, holding a cup of coffee.
Yes, you probably guessed it again, someone mistook him for a homeless person and dropped a quarter into his coffee.

So what I want to know is, DID God come on down and help? 

And where can I get one of these awesome lab coats?   But I'd prefer dollars to quarters - thanks.

Good story, Bob!

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