If you don’t know,
most businesses – at least they used to – sweep and mop their stores every
single day. Businesses that had high traffic, it was amazing how quickly things
can get pretty funky. So while we don’t go through and sweep and mop every
single day, I would say that we do it at a minimum of twice a week.
The truth is I think
we do it to maintain a semblance of order. If you look outside, chaos still
reigns. I could not imagine being stuck within the confines of Tulsa or
Oklahoma City with all this going on. Especially during the opening salvos of
this war, I can imagine there would be all kinds of gunshots, sirens
(ambulance, cop & fire), screams, wails, and the incessant moaning of the
risen dead. And while you have to listen to all of this, all you can do is stay
locked down and make like a hole in the world. Sure, we did that here in
Langley but a town of 800 versus a city of over one million?
Even now, when you
look out there, Langley and all the surrounding areas are decimated. What
wasn’t damaged in standoffs or burned to the ground or smashed open by the
roving hordes has been left abandoned. Skittish animals have made house with
open doors their dens. It took one summer season for lawns to get out of
control. You don’t realize how much maintenance goes into preserving a society
until all those contributing hands are gone. Just spending two seasons with
humanity gone, I can totally understand how a jungle could swallow up ancient
civilizations like the Mayans and the Aztecs. And this is Oklahoma.
I guess that is why
we still clean and sweep and mop and take Libby out for her runs. Even now, as
I typed it, I realized that sentence made no sense. It’s a funny story. Well,
not really. It is actually quite sad. Okay, I will just tell it and I will let
you be the judge. See there was dude that worked at store a while back. If
memory serves he left last year for some construction job. His name was Mark.
And then there was this checker named Libby.
There is really no
delicate way to put this. Libby was a big girl. So much so that in a wrestling
match, she probably could have taken me down. So, it is summer time and Mark
had a history of taking Libby out to the far end of the parking lot where it is
a little darker than the rest of the surrounding area, climbing in the back of
his pick up, and then doing the hibbity-dippity. Now, this was often after the
second shift clocked out at 11:00 and made room for the overnight crew. On a
weekday, Wednesday night, Langley is pretty quiet. So rather than taking her
back to his place where his roommates were going to make fun of him, he would
just bang her in the back of his truck. (Naturally, the jokes started that he
couldn’t do things with her in the cab of his truck because she was too big.)
This went on for a while. And then… yep, you see it coming… they broke up.
And in a bit of
comedic revenge, Mark hung a sign on our floor cleaning machine that read “The
Libby II.” Crass, crude, uncalled for… but funny. And unfortunately, the name
stuck. So now, even to this day, the floor machine is called “Libby,” despite
the fact that Mark and Libby do not even work here anymore.
I know it is horrible
but I have to admit it… I am going to miss stories like that. They just don’t
have much place here in the Post-Zombie world. Or… maybe they do. Maybe we need
them now more than ever…
