One day Billy was doing his regular old business of taking out the trash and cleaning the parking lot. You see, he was a hard-working member of society. He worked at a Wendy’s. Billy walked around the parking lot and swept up all the miscellaneous trash. How could people just leave trash everywhere? Like the trash can is literally two feet away? Furthermore, why come to any Wendy’s parking lot to eat a bag of potato chips? The alternative to that theory is that these parking lot folk used this opportunity to clean out their car by throwing trash on the ground before going into the store.
Hold on, there is a trash can between the counter and their car. So why? Never mind that is not the point of this story.
Billy persevered through this unfortunate hardship and me, the narrator, through this philosophical conundrum of distribution of trash. After finishing sweeping the trash, Billy had to scrub the drive-thru lane. As he shuffled around the lot, laboring, Billy didn’t know that his doom was ahead of him. When Billy finished this task, he began taking the trash from inside the restaurant to the dumpster.
Billy always listened to music while performing these tasks. Blink-182 came on. Not the top 40 though. We can only hope for Billy’s sake that it was something from Dude Ranch. No one wants “All the Small Things” to be the last song they hear. Of course, I, as an outside observer, must note that Billy would probably like that.
All music criticism aside, Billy began putting the trash in the dumpster. He threw the first couple of bags into the dumpster and heard a noise. If his fate was not so harsh, he should have considered himself lucky to have the nasally ballad interrupted. Rather than feeling relief, he felt concerned. He paused a moment and then thought to himself, “I’m just being paranoid. I’m a hard worker and bad things won’t happen to me!”
Who thinks like that? Maybe Billy deserved what happened next.
He continued his work and threw the bag of gushingly gross and grimy grease into the similarly apparelled dumpster.
Wait! What is this? A child’s story? Who writes like that? Whatever, back to Billy.
The bag full of grease began its descent and landed in the dumpster. At this instant, the horrid event occurred. Jake the Raccoon, a grease-soaked vermin, shot out of the dumpster straight into the air, and eloquently said, “RRRRRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOO!” Billy calmly retorted, “HOLY @#*(&$@(.”
As Jake the Raccoon ran off, drenched in grease, Billy also jumped into the sky as he had never done before, turned around, and performed a sprint that would put Usain Bolt to shame.
That is an exaggeration. Billy is not that fast. A more accurate description would be, “Billy ran fast for a Wendy’s employee.”
At some point during Billy’s labors, another coworker had come outside to work and witnessed the heinous acts of Jake the Raccoon. The rascally raccoon had nearly scared Billy to dastardly death. When Billy noticed this other observer he thought, “Yes, a witness, now this evil raccoon won’t get away with giving me a heart attack.” The other coworker would not cooperate though. He feared Jake the Raccoon, as many did. Yes, many feared Jake the Racoon. Chances are that it was several local raccoons, but there is not much interesting material happening during a typical shift at this Wendy’s. So, the raccoon was named and thought of as harmless. Jake was not really that threatening. Imagine having day old burger grease dumped on you while you are having your breakfast. Billy had other, less rational thoughts.
“Jake has to pay!” Jake scares the populace of this particular Wendy’s.
So who is this populace? The customers and the employees, I guess.
According to Billy, this display of grease-soaked jumping did not compare to Jake’s most heinous act; Jake was a total mooch eating all that food for free without ever considering to pay for it. “How dare he!? Does he think because he is a raccoon that the law of humans doesn’t apply to him? If so he was sadly mistaken!”
Billy needs to calm down. It is literally just a raccoon. Billy was just mad because he almost defecated in his pants in front of his coworkers, but he will always believe it was a matter of principle.
Yes, Billy, the principle of pride.