"Do You Have Strawberry Shortcake Panties?"

"One, two, three...tie. Again. One, two, three...another tie. Again. One, two, three...I win! Scissors beats paper! You got women's and girls clothing duty! See you later sucka!" my Co-worker shouts gleefully. 

The assistant manager had just come by and informed us that one of the two of us would need to straighten the clothing (called zoning) in the women and little girl's section. Several of the associates scheduled for that area had called out, so they needed help from other areas of the store.

The only fair way to choose was to play a round of "Paper, rock, scissors" to see who would spend the day folding clothing and straightening the racks. Stupid, stupid, stupid! I should have picked rock.


I trudge across the aisle from electronics over to the little girls clothing. 


"Where do you need me?" I ask one of the associates who works in clothing.


She giggles. This is not a good sign.


"Can you...hee, hee...you're not gonna believe this...hee, hee...sorry. All we have left is...ha, ha, ha....sorry, Dave. All we have left is little girl's underwear...ha, ha, ha, ha!" She doubles over laughing.


"Are you serious?" I ask, sure that it's some kind of joke. "No, really. Where do you need me?"


She's still laughing.


"I'm serious...ha, ha, ha...I did everything but the little girl's stuff! You need to zone the little girl's underwear and swimsuits!" She's laughing so hard that she needs to lean against a clothing rack carousel. "Sorry...it's really not that funny....but ha, ha, haaaaa!"


"Why don't you zone girl's and I'll help somewhere else?" I ask.


"I'm going on my lunch break. There's an inspection this afternoon, so it needs to get done." She's wiping tears from her eyes. "Sorry, but it really needs to get done, and I'm all alone in the department."


Great.


So there I am, a 6'0 tall, 365 lb. grown man with a goatee straightening the little girl underwear rack. I'm trying to move fast so I can get out of the section, but as luck would have it, EVERYTHING needs sorting and folding. It can literally take hours to finish. It's not looking good for my ego today.


"Do you have any 'Strawberry Shortcake' panties?" a lady asks.


"Ma'am, I usually don't work in this area. I'm sorry, but I haven't seen any." I say.


"No problem. Just thought I'd ask." she says. 

The lady's two-year-old daughter has been sitting in the cart listening to the conversation and staring at me with big eyes.


As I turn back to my panty sorting duties the daughter whispers loudly to her mother, "That man is too big for those panties."


My humiliation is complete.

Boy Scouts and Aliens

"What was that?" several frightened boy scouts asked me frantically.

"I have no idea!" I replied, just as frightened and amazed. 

Normally, when  I was presented with this kind of question I would be able to come up with a pretty good explanation -- true or made up. But I wasn't going to fool anyone by making something up on this one. It was too bizarre. 

"That was freaky" one of the scouts commented. I couldn't agree more. 


"Is anyone hurt?" I asked. I had a golf ball sized knot forming on my head. Several of the scouts were bruised pretty bad, but no one was critically hurt.

We were camping on Mt. Hood in the middle of winter. The snow pack was a good six feet deep, perfect for building snow shelters and sleeping in them.

I had taken scouts snow camping numerous times before, and this was the spot I liked best. Right across from Mt. Hood Meadows ski resort was a place to go cross country skiing and snow shoeing. There was even a large parking area that made it easy to unload our gear and walk a couple of hundred feet into the woods where our snow shelters were. 

We had dug the shelters the weekend before. One of my rules with the younger scouts was that we made sure that the shelters were good and sturdy before sleeping a couple of nights in them. If they could hold up a week, then I felt we were in pretty good shape.


The other adult leaders were in caves. I was in a tent near the cave entrances so that I could hear if anyone needed help. When you are in a cave, it's difficult to hear what's going on outside, thus the need for one adult to stay above. I also had one of the older scouts and three younger scouts who suffered from claustrophobia in another tent position next to mine. We were the ones that had gone through the ordeal. Those in the caves were oblivious to what had just happened.


We looked around at the wreckage. Both tents were flattened by large snow chunks, some as large as basketballs, icy and compacted. Several branches that had been knocked from the trees lay scattered around.


We were just about ready to start cleaning up the area when one of the scouts yelled, "Here it comes again!" 


Indeed, we could hear the crashing of ice chunks through the trees coming our way. This time we dove under the protection of the nearby trees as the huge chunks tore off branches and further damaged out equipment.


"I think that came from the opposite direction" I told the older scout. 


He nodded. "Yeah, it hit our tent first last time. This time it hit yours. It's like it's going back and forth."


His prediction was right on, because the sound of ice crashing through the trees was heard again coming back toward us.

Back and forth the snow chunk storm went, almost like a World War II strafing run.


As we huddled behind the trees, I wondered what was going on. Freak snow storm? End of the world? Practical joke with potentially deadly consequences? To make matters worse, there was a flashing yellow strobe that we didn't see the first two passes. 

That narrowed it down. It had to be aliens and they were trying to take us out with their ice-chunking weapon.


One of the scouts was clad only in his long underwear, so he went back to the mangled tent to retrieve his jacket. He was on a bank that overlooked the parking lot when the phenomenon happened again. I was watching the scout because he was out in the open where one of the ice chunks could seriously injure or kill him. I was about to yell at him to run for cover when he started jumping up and down and waving his arms.


"Stop!" he yelled, still waving his arms. "Stop! Stop!"

A beam of light focused on him. Great. He was caught in the aliens tractor beam. Just what was I going to tell his parents? That their son had been abducted by aliens?


Miraculously, the ice storm immediately stopped. An eerie silence followed.


"Guys, come here" said the scout. He was doubled over laughing.


We cautiously made our way to the bank overlooking the parking lot. The blinking yellow strobe caught my eye immediately. It was positioned on top of the highway department snow plow equipped with a gigantic snow blower.