I know it's long, but it's my favorite.
I got a job at the local one-stop shopping center just down the street back in HS. The store was remodeling itself and they needed extra hands. This was in the nice-and-hot days of August here in OR. My first week there was my manager's last week. He was freaking cool. There were these two teenage girls over in grocery who would play pranks on him and who he would play pranks on in return. His last day, Friday, they decided to take a roll of shrink wrap and ran it a few times around his van. Ooooooooohhh... wrapped around twice! How scary!
So he grabbed me and another guy from the R5 team and told us to get some shrink wrap. Lots of it. So I grabbed one of the partial rolls from the store floor where we were still wrapping product on pallets for temporary transporation while the isles were broken down and replaced. For the hell of it, I grabbed a brand new roll from the back as well. These rolls, new, were about ten inches in diameter and about a 12 or 14 inches long. If you know anything about shrink wrap, stretching, and heat, you can see where this is going. My manager decided to show them how to really shrink wrap a car. While on duty, about 10am, we left the store headed for the parking lot. Now, think of it this way. In a town of about 60,000 people, it's the biggest place to shop in the entire city. This place has a respectable sized parking lot and there were lots of people that day. So here we are. One guy with a white name tag and one new roll of shrink wrap. One guy with a white name tag carrying a new and a partial roll of shrinkwrap. And one guy with a black and gold name talk walking around in the morning heat leading the two around the parkinglot. We'd go car-by-car looking for their cars. When I asked wtf we were doing, the manager said that he didn't actually know which cars were theirs.
Fantastic.
One of the cars had a college application face-up on the passenger seat with one of the girl's names on it. Bingo: mark one cheap red two-door hatch back import. The second car had a bags in the back seat with tags on them, headed for the airport. Bingo: mark one cheap off-white four door import.
The manager told this other guy to get on the other side of the white car, and they started sending the roll over the car one way, then under the car the other way, wrapping the doors closed. I stood there wondering what to do, but not for long. I took one of the new rolls, laced the leading end into their work and started literally running around the car, inter-weaving my roll with theirs. As the morning got hotter, the shrink wrap began to tighten up. After using up about half of their roll and half of mine, we stopped and laughed -heading for the second car. By this time, customers who were coming in and out of the parking spaces next to this gave us some seriously weird looks.
The second car started even faster with me not wasting any time zooming around the red car. By this time, I was starting to get dizzy but it would so be worth it. Just after starting, my manager goes "Oh sh|t! Take your name tags off!" and we did it, just in time. Some guy came up to us and asked what we were doing, dodging my lapping the car and looking up and down as the two guys on either side passed the other roll over the car, under the car, over the car, etc. Before I or the other guy could speak, my manager spoke up and told the guy that it's his last day and he's settling a few scores with other people who worked there and the gent seemed to lighten up before he left. Phew. The more we wrapped, the less we could see red and the more we could only see extremely light pink and then all white. Some guy drove up and didn't bother getting out but yelling "what are you crazies doing!?" That's when we realized that we couldn't really give the real response, so we ignored him until we came up with a proper response. This time, some old lady came by in an old beater and asked very sharply what the hell we were doing. We told her that we were picking random parking spots and that she needs to think carefully before she parks and goes in the store. She drove off yelling that if we touched her car, she'd sue. Hilarity!
When we were done, we picked up the thick empty cardboard tubes and slid one down each antenna and I kept the third. The three of us went back in (now about noon and the shrink wrap was so tight that it was almost like armor). We found both girls, one at a time, and had them come with us. Casually walking toward the door, they asked why I was carrying an empty carboard tube with me and my only response was "shrink wrap" which sent them screaming for the doors "WHAT? NOOOOO!!!!!" Stupid girls had their box knives on them and they started working on their cars and the three of us were ROLLING laughing.
Just then, the store manager came out with a flaming red face. She said that some lady made a complaint to the store that there were people outside damaging customer vehicles and that if it happened to hers, she was going to sue the store. This lady was a real bitch to boot, but it seemed like satan himself came out when she was pissed. I stood there frozen, still holding the tube over my shoulder (and not realizing it). She looked at me, the tube, and then my manager and goes "If I find out that you guys were involved, you're FIRED!" I knew I couldn't do anything about it so I just went with it -but my manager turned, took the roll from me, looked back at her, and said "why, michelle, I wouldn't know what you're talking about" and she stormed off. She got fired a short time later and nothing ever happened to us.
