I had been volunteered to man an Ask A Vet booth at a Pet Expo at a local mall. My boss signed up for him to do it but “forgot” that he was out of the country on that day. I’m suspicious. LOL

So anyway there were all these flyers around that prominently featured the Ask A Vet area of the expo. I was worried. I don’t do well with stupid and who knew what kind of crazy questions I was going to get. But I had a notebook with me so I could write down the best of them for blog fodder!

I get there yesterday and finally found a person who looked to be in charge. Long story short, they didn’t set up an Ask A Vet area. They told me just to hang out at my clinic’s booth that they got for supplying a vet to the Ask A Vet area. Weird and strangely disappointing.

But I did get to spend 8 hours in the mall watching people go by. Here’s what I learned.

  • If you are 75 year old woman or older, please rethink wearing the “Martinis make my clothes fall off” shirt
  • Likewise, pants with an orange slice print on a black background aren’t attractive

    • Train

  • The mall has a train that isn’t on rails and drives around the aisles of the mall. I want to drive the train. The engine has a radio for the driver which we figure is the only thing keeping him from total insanity. If I was the driver though I want something more substantial than a bell to ring if people are in my way. I want an airhorn. People are quite oblivious to a train coming up behind them but in their defense, who’d really expect that? My assistant and I did the princess wave to everyone on the train every time it went by. Which was often.
  • My trainer who made me photograph all my food walked by. It made me very happy to see his children giving him a hard time since generally he is the one handing out the abuse. I pointed him out to my assistant and said that it was a good thing I had thrown out my McDonalds cup (it was iced tea). She waited until he was looking my way and then threw a candy bar onto the table in front of me. She’s evil. A bit later I walked around the rest of the booths but I couldn’t take any candy because I was afraid that he was lurking somewhere.
  • We had all kinds of free stuff to give away. People were like locusts. The worst ones were two ladies running a table two booths away from us. They would wait until we got busy and then stroll over and take some stuff. Now, they weren’t as inconspicuous as they thought they were since they were both pushing 6 feet tall and were not fine boned women and one was wearing leopard print. We didn’t care but when they packed up and left their bags were full of our stuff. I counted at least 10 of our frisbees. They are neon colors. It wasn’t like we couldn’t see them.
  • One of the volunteers for one of the rescues would walk by us and randomly stop and tell us really dumb jokes. We didn’t know him. We weren’t sure if we’d ever feel the need to stop and tell total strangers weird jokes but we better learn some in case the urge strikes.
  • At one point my assistant started muttering, “Just keep walking, just keep walking.” She knew the person walking by. It was an ex’s cousin and she said that she always says hi to her in a really squeaky voice and then she would poke her and say, “Poke!” She said that the last time she saw her she ended up trapped in this girl’s house for 2 hours while she talked to her through her dog.
    So about 10 minutes later I’m talking to a lady and see the cousin coming back from the opposite direction. This time she recognized Jordan. She walks over and I hear a very squeaky, “Hi Jordan.” I stifled a giggle because I was talking to someone but then out of the corner of my eye I could see her finger reaching across the table – in super slow motion – I knew what was going to happen. I almost burst from holding in the laugh. And then she finally reached Jordan’s arm, poked it and said “Poke!” I’m surprised I didn’t have a stroke right there and then from holding in the laughter.

    • Man Down

  • This was my view all day. I can’t decide if the poor fellow on the left is a victim of S & M gone wrong or a warning to wannabe thugs that they need to pull up their freakin’ pants.

    • All in all, I don’t know if we did much good for the clinic but we were able to direct people to where the train picked up passengers, how to find the food court, and answered the question “Is this some kind of dog day?” for 8 hours without ever once responding, “Yes, that would be why there are all kinds of dogs here”.