Kill the Rat! / What’s the opposite of flagship? by Joan S

Pet or Pest? By Joan S

        I’ve worked a number of nutty jobs and have been pondering which one to plunder for stories. Lucky for you all, the first job I ever had raised its ugly head last week when we had a rat visit our workplace.

I was working at McCooks Theatre in a somewhat seedy part of Dayton, Ohio in 1976, it was my first job. I worked the concession stand where we served popcorn that was pre-popped and slathered in buttery flavored oil. The theatre was the (what’s the opposite of flagship?) lesser theatre in the chain of theatres, and had just come off a Jaws marathon of six months. They were showing something nobody wanted to see, even for the paltry price of one dollar, so the theatre was pretty empty.

I remember an older lady, and at 16, she was probably 30, come up and whisper that there was a rat running around the aisles. Our manager, a newly divorced man with a perm, immediately turned to the usher and demanded that he dispatch it. I was horrified on so many levels, and cringed when that young man sent back into the dark theatre with a baseball bat. The six people in the audience didn’t seem to care that there was a burly teenager chasing and finally pummeling a rat 20 feet away, at least no one asked for a refund. Which brings me back to the present day when my 23-year-old coworker yells at me to look at the ground in front of me and I see a rat ambling along the bottom of a set of shelves.

OMG, did you see that? Did you see that? I wasn’t quite sure what to do, I certainly didn’t want to bludgeon it with a garden rake, so I got on the Walkie-Talkie and called loss prevention. While loss prevention is telling me, rats aren’t their job, my coworker is asking if we could catch him and get him shots and maybe someone could take it home as a pet. Needless to say, the pest people came after I left work for the day and removed the rat. I’m not sure if they used a baseball bat. My coworker the next day was still bemoaning the loss of his potential pet.